The New Adventures Of Billy The Kid

The New Adventures of Billy the Kid is a very short adventure game by catmitts.

The game tells the story Billy the Kid who sold his soul to the devil and must get enough cash to pay his debt. He does so by fulfilling simple tasks offered to him by citizens from the town of Wicita. The game is really really short (I beat it in 12 minutes). What I've said about it in the intro is probably too much of a spoiler already, so I do good in not going into much detail of the story. Despite being really short, I enjoyed this game very much, and I believe it clearly brings out the strengths as well as the weakness of catmitts games.

THE GOOD
Visually, this game is great. Catmitts' games always use photos of weird stuff as objects. This time characters and objects were drawn on paper, and scenarios on... a thicker paper which's name I don't know. Apart from the blue sky and brown ground, everything is basically black and white. It works well. Drawings are simple yet charming, and I liked the facial expression of the characters. I consider this game to be visually much better than Too Many Kittens and Ghost Voyage, if not the best-looking catmitts game yet. My only dislike has to do with the bedsheet background, which takes up too much room of the screen imo.

The second strength of catmitts' games is writing, especially when it comes to the main character. I love Billy the Kid's false naiveté and forced politeness. All the other characters basically do not much more than bringing out Billy's personality, and it's a job well done.

I understand that catmitts values originality immensely, and this is also an achievement of this game. We all know that being original is very risky because we may end up being messy. The New Adventures of Billy the Kid uses paper sketches as characters, a bedsheet as a background, and a cowboy dealing with Greek mythological creatures in a old-western town as a plot. And it works great.

THE BAD
My complaint about this game is probably the same complaint I have about all of catmitts' game, but it seems to be getting worse each time: gameplay/interactivity. The New Adventures of Billy the Kid comes real close to being a visual novel, not a game. Although you can walk around and talk to people "freely", there aren't many choices to be made. The only apparent choice I got was figuring what to tell the sphinx, but in the end it's just a way to give you some extra dialog, since there's one single correct answer, and the game moves on linearly from there. I know AGS is limited in that sense, but not as limited as not to allow any non-linearity in Adventure games.

SO WHAT?
Overall, this game is definitely worth playing, a short yet fun experience, and I find it to be an improvement over catmitts' previous games in terms of writing, graphics and style.