Curiosity: A Cat Climbing Game

In Curiosity, you play as a cat. What is your goal? To climb. You can do other cat things, such as knocking things over, sitting in places, or meowing. But your primary purpose is to climb and go upwards. This is a precision platformer where you must jump from precarious tiny platform to precarious tiny platform, sometimes avoiding obstacles, as you continue going up. You may land on your feet if you fall, but it is a long way down.

Find it on Steam.

Curiosity is a game in the newly popular genre of rage climbing games. It was popularized by Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy. The idea is to ask the players to go upwards. These games are often unforgiving as any mistakes will send you hurtling down, sometimes all the way to the beginning. Not to mention the traps and things you can’t know about until you experience them. You would need a lot of patience to get through one of these games. Which I don’t have.

It is a good thing that Curiosity is an easier version of the ascending game. They provide a few tools to allow the players not to lose all progress if they fall. There are major checkpoints where you can save your progress. And saving your progress is important! Don’t just turn off the game expecting to start where you left off. If you only start at where you last saved. Note that collectibles are a separate auto-save, so you can collect something and just quit while still keeping it.

Aside from major checkpoints, you get self-placed respawn points that you can return to in case you fall. (Remember, you need to save your game at a checkpoint to save the location of the respawn points). You get nine lives, with refills at each checkpoint, and it takes one every time to decide to go back to a respawn point. Now what happens if you run out of lives? I’ll let you discover that for yourself, though the game does give you a way to continue.

I played the game on a controller, though I do think there are advantages to doing it on a mouse and keyboard as well. For one, the game has only manual camera controls. Doing more technical jumps and controlling the camera at the same time on a controller is a bit rougher. It is manageable, especially if you know it is coming. There is no button remapping, though, and the run button feels awkward for me to press. There was a free button they could have used, but run is the left bumper stick.

Speaking of the camera, since you control it, sometimes I’ll get lost in what’s level. As a cat, you can go up and down some pretty steep slopes, but eventually you’ll start falling. It can be rough to tell exactly how steep something is at times, but overall, you get a sense for it, along with doing the jumps. 3D platform jumping is always a challenge. The game eases you into things with a gentle opening level allowing you to build a feel for how far or high you can jump and how your cat moves.

The game will soon throw more challenges at you where the risk of falling is real. There is a nice variety of zones full of interesting visuals, good music, and secrets to find.  Each place is distinctive with strong themes. They all have some unique challenges as well. Watch out for cannon fire in the aquarium zone.

The game is called Curiosity, so go look around. There are coins you can find to buy cosmetics for your cat as well as lost cats you can chat with. I enjoy the voice acting for the cats. It is just people saying meow over and over again. Though you can buy translators and they’ll start speaking English. There is much to find in the game if you want to take the risk of falling.

If you’re interested in these kinds of precision platformers about going upwards but have been put off other games because they can be frustrating, Curiosity does a lot to fix those problems. This game is beatable with a bit of effort and practice. Though if you want the good ending, you’ll need to avoid losing too many lives. Playing through the game a second time, you’ll be surprised at how much more manageable everything is. I, at least, felt a sense of getting better and doing everything faster, if only because I knew what was coming up.

For full context, this game is produced and designed by a Youtuber I watch. That was how I first found out about the game. Also, all the voice actors in the game are basically other streamer and youtuber friends he has. The game was originally only called Curiosity, which I thought was a bit generic and hard to search for. I’m glad they added the second title, A Cat Climbing Game.

Curiosity: A Cat Climbing Game is solid platforming fun with some good challenges. The stage design is strong with some cool music. You can get a lot of cute or cool accessories for your cat from hats to shoes. And the story is decent as well. They also recently added a butthole update. Now your cat can have a (censored) butthole if you want. Of course, this begs the question: Is there really a butthole under that mosaic? Or is it merely a mosaic with nothing interesting underneath?

Truly something to ponder.

Find it on Steam.