PUSS!

A trip into a vibrant, colorful, psychedelic and bizarre world via one of the most basic, yet cleverly designed gameplay of the genre. Highly addictive if you get past the overwhelming visuals.

If challenging games aren’t your thing, it would probably be best to stay away from Puss! However, overall, Puss! is a fairly decent game for those who enjoy a challenge, it certainly won’t disappoint.

It’s pretty tough and I love its strange nature, but the gameplay itself can wear thin after a while. Definitely a case of style over substance, but at least that style stands out.

PUSS! is a lot of fun and manages to successfully give players something refreshing. Its levels are never boring thanks to its well-crafted puzzles, and that's without going into its impressive visual stylings. Players after something a little bit different will want to check it out, even if it's best played in short bursts.

PUSS! is an absolute trip and manages to take a bizarre concept and turn it into a solid experience. If this is what the cat dragged in, it’s welcome here anytime.

Like the visuals and the sound, my recommendation for PUSS! is a complex, chaotic beast. On the one hand, it’s a beautiful, brilliant game. I haven’t heard a game soundtrack this unique in literal years. The visuals will haunt your dreams for days after you’re done with this game. And yet, the challenge is either insurmountable or woefully insufficient. After a moment of weakness, I decided to look up some let’s plays on YouTube. It turns out I’m just not good at maze games? A man hands as shaky as these should have seen this coming, but still. My evaluation of the difficulty is tied to my skills in the genre overall. To that end, if you’re a maze gamer? This will be an absolute blast. Conversely, if you’ve got no patience for high precision movement and constant dodging, PUSS! might be a pretty bad time. Either way, you’re unlikely to see a game quite like this for a very long time.

If you’re after something challenging and, shall we say, different, then PUSS! could well be right up your alley. Its gameplay is simple enough for anyone to pick up, but the difficulty ramps up quickly to outrageous levels. Nevertheless, it remains strangely addictive, and will likely hold your attention for a good while as you pour blood, sweat, and tears into progressing through its levels, inch by inch.

Puss! certainly has some things going for it. From its surreal aesthetics to its haunting sound design that evokes the feeling of tuning into a radio station in some strange, far-off land, the game’s presentation is top-tier stuff. And while occasionally a bit unfair with all of the chaos unfolding all at once, the boss battles are always memorable. Still, it’s hard to recommend the game to all but the most patient players at the end of the day. If you’ve got ice water pumping through your veins or are looking for a fun way to torture your friends during your next drunken gaming gathering, Puss! might be worth adding to your Switch library. However, if you don’t find yourself in either of those camps, then this probably isn’t going to be the game for you.

PUSS! is a challenging mouse maze experience, both due to deliberate game design (that's good) and some gameplay quirks and confusing visuals (that's bad). The game will be too frustrating and bewildering for some, while others will enjoy the maddening design and get a rush of satisfaction from completing it.

teamcoil’s PUSS! is memorable for its visual style and bizarre aesthetics, but the gameplay sadly doesn’t match the creativity of its graphics. For any player excited by the surreal dialogue and fearsome bosses, there will be another player who won’t be engaged in navigating simple mazes. I anticipate the difficulty will also be prohibitive for some players, and it does feel like the challenge and repetition are the only things stopping the game from being overly short (and there’s only so much that can be done to spice up this style of gameplay, too.) I love that the Switch’s eShop is a home for strange games like this one, and I appreciate the nod to Newgrounds culture, but this one left me wanting a lot more.

Because PUSS! is so odd, it feels like calling it “good” or “bad” is missing the point. This is the kind of game you should play when you really want something totally different, and you want your senses assaulted the whole time you’re playing. It is what it is — and even though I’ve always hated that phrase, it’s the most appropriate way to describe PUSS!

PUSS! is a punishing pixel-precision challenge wrapped in psychedelic visuals. It feels far too brutal, and the control methods available aren’t always suited to the task. It is a unique challenge, however, for the brave.

PUSS! is an unusual arrival, in the sense that there's not much to say about it, other than being a very surreal and by no means conventional experience, with an audiovisual environment that fits the description. Unfortunately its difficulty level makes finishing the game a very difficulty task, and the occasional crashes only hinder what value PUSS! could have brought for some fringes of the public.