Little Kitty, Big City Review - Little Kitty, Big Heart
While Little Kitty, Big City launched 12 months ago, it has only now become available to PlayStation owners in the last few months – cue me checking the game out at long last. The title received plenty of praise when it launched in May 2024, for Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and PC, but is now exposed to the PlayStation community for the first time, and what they’ll discover, as I did, is a simple, serene playing experience that possesses both an expansive playground, but also a brevity that ensures the game doesn’t outstay its welcome.
We’re all too accustomed to seeing cats sleeping precariously on balconies, and if you’re anything like me, you’re surprised that we don’t see more accidents, but in Little Kitty, Big City, an accident does in-fact occur, with the adorable black feline falling off a ledge of its multi-storey apartment home, plunging to the ground to find itself in unfamiliar surrounds. The objective is an uncomplicated one, climbing back to your apartment to resume normal proceedings, however, as an indoor kitty before this unfortunate predicament, your stamina for the vertical adventure isn’t what it needs to be. As the player explores the city they’ve fallen into, meets a range of the other local creatures, and navigate the hustle and bustle of the human world, you must develop the strength required to climb back home. It’s a simplistic, wafer-thin plot, but anything else would have simply gotten in the way of the endearing characters, and the fun of explorign the world as an adorable cat.
Mechanically, the cat handles quite smoothly. The player can scoot along narrow walkways, jump from platform to platform, crawl through holes in walls, pounce on unsuspecting pigeons, and burn stamina to climb to new heights. As the player earns each one of the four fish scattered around the city, their stamina meter builds, allowing you to scale greater heights, unlocking more quests in the world that can be completed, more adorable hats for the cat to wear, and taking you one step closer to your ultimate objective. There’s nothing inventive or extraordinary about the gameplay, and in some areas, the collision (or lack of it) could have received some finer tuning, but what the game offers serves the needs of the player well.
The game’s greatest strength is its writing. From your adorable feline protagonist to the various two and four-legged wonders of Mother Nature that you encounter, Little City, Big City is nothing without these excellently written characters. From some dad jokes that will make you wince, to excellent one-liners, and witty banter, it’s the way the animals converse, and the sometimes ludicrous situations they’re in, that drives the player to explore the layers to this world that exist beyond simply crawling back up to your cozy bed by the window.
The visual artistry is another of the game’s major highlights. The way the environments and then the residents of the world pop is fantastic, and the plain-faced humans that walk the world only serve to help everything else shine brighter. The audio work is nothing particularly of note, as the ambient noises of the city do the heavy lifting. The wonky camera controls can be the biggest obstacle to navigate for players, both in terms of the gameplay, but also with respect to how you consume the sights of the world – it won’t break the experience for you, but it can get a bit unwieldy at times.
Little City, Big City is a fantastic debut title from Double Dagger Studio, and I’m delighted that myself, and now millions of prospective new players, all have the opportunity to check it out. The game doesn’t deliver a revolutionary new experience, but it does some excellent things to ensure a smile is on your face throughout the 2-hour main game, and for the other half-dozen hours you’ll want to commit to see everything the world has in store.
Little Kitty, Big City was reviewed on PS5 with a code kindly provided by PopAgenda.
