We all know that cats always land on their feet.  And buttered toast, well, it always has the unfortunate habit of landing butter-side down.  So what would happen if you strapped a piece of buttered toast to the back of a cat?  Why, you’d get a spinning, flying cat, of course!  Cato: Buttered Cat is a puzzle game about one such cat.  You must control the cat and toast both together and separately to solve puzzles, and the very generous (roughly 45 minutes to an hour long) demo contains 24 out of over 200 puzzles!

Cato: Buttered Cat may look silly on the surface, but the demo showed me that it actually has some pretty fun and thought-provoking puzzles.  These puzzles are solved by having the cat and toast work together and separately using their own simple abilities.  Together, they can effortlessly fly about the room.  And separately, the cat can climb up certain walls, and the toast can jump, using its buttered side to stick to walls and wall jump.  (The cat is controlled with the control stick, while the left and right trigger buttons make the toast jump in those directions.)  These simple abilities may not seem like much on the surface, but there are various other mechanics that help to make the experience a bit deeper.  For example, the cat and toast must “disassemble” to pass through “paradox walls”.  The toast cannot get any traction to jump on ice, and it can use toasters to activate switches and launch itself around the room.  As for the cat, it has its own switches it can activate, plus it can traverse through thin tubes.

This all combined to create some pretty fun puzzles as toast and cat worked together to open doors, traverse through a room, and reunite in order to fly to the next screen.  The puzzles were quite clever and made me think, and they didn’t feel like something I had seen a million times before.  And to make matters even better, none of the puzzles were too obtuse for me to solve, and I managed to figure out all of them on my own with a few minutes of thought and trial and error.  (So many of the puzzles actually had such deceptively simple solutions that I felt quite silly for not figuring them out sooner!)  Not many puzzle games manage to hit just the right balance like that, and I appreciate that this game does…at least, as far as I can tell from the demo.  Last of all, level 24 switched things up a bit by being a slide level where you must jump and disassemble to avoid obstacles.  Check points were plentiful, and I really enjoyed the change of pace.

The full game is advertised to have more than 200 levels across five worlds and even boss fights.  Cato has been quite well-received, though I do feel like it is best played in short bursts, as the demo tired my brain out just from the 24 short levels I played through.  If you want a unique and charming puzzle game, then this might be a good option for you.  Cato: Buttered Cat is available on Steam for $10.99 and Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 5 for $11.99 and can take roughly 6 hours for the main game and double that if you play through the extra levels.

Banner image is official cover art; screenshots were taken by The Duck of Indeed