Too Many Kittens

Too Many Kittens is a very strange and short adventure game by catmitts. You play the role of a bitter yet eloquent gorilla who lives in a condo full of other interesting characters, and your goal is to get rid of a bunch of intruder kittens.

This game stands out for two things, one of which I liked, one of which I didn't.

The good one was dialog. Theodore Gorilla is a very funny, clever character, and the whole entertainment aspect of Too Many Kittens is founded on Theodore's rants about... well, pretty much everything. The other condo inhabitants are also funny and caricaturesque.

The bad one was graphics. I'm not against the graphical concept of taking pictures from real-life objects and using them in a game. It worked well in Biggles on Mars, for example. But catmitts artistical efforts weren't as much successful in this one. There's only one screen in the entire game, and that's the condo. Its background is a very indistinct hand drawing of house furniture, and the objects are clay models of... well, something. The gorilla looks like a gorilla, the toad looks like a toad, but I can't identify the nature of any other object or character (at least until it's textually mentioned). It somehow just seemed like a bunch of random clay shapes placed on shelves at a scribbled wall. The real problem is not that it's ugly, it's that it interferes with gameplay, as sometimes I had to aimlessly click everywhere in the screen before finding that that hidden black spot at the corner of the screen was an important object. Well-shaped clay models with a clearer photo in the background would have made this game much better, both gameplay and aesthetically-wise.

I also felt the game might have been excessively passive, seeing that there was really no gameplay options, just talking and finding out where to click next. Maybe there isn't much more to expect from this genre of game, but... well, it felt passive. Everything involved a single-screen point-and-click effort. The gorilla moves around, but it doesn't really have to, since you don't have to be close to the objects on the screen to interact with them.

Apart from that, the single-song soundtrack of the game is pretty nice, the puzzles were very cool, and I really enjoyed the ending of the story. Although the main character's speech pattern was apparently based on a very annoying real person, Theodore Gorilla is a fantastic character. I'd like to see him in future games.