A Case of Little Kitty, Little City
The people of Pawbay seem annoyed by the number of cats, dropping onto their dinner tables and pushing bottles off shelves, but I can’t help thinking that they have brought it on themselves. They’re the ones who chose to keep dozens of cats, and they even named their town ‘Pawbay’. “You reap what you sow”, and all that.
There are plenty of cat simulators on the Xbox, but Pawbay has a couple of trump cards tucked into its collar. The first is that it’s a sand (or litter) box. There’s no gating to be seen: you can wander about the entirety of Pawbay from the start. There are no upgrades that prevent you from reaching the furthest or highest points. The world, much like it is to real cats, is a playground that bends to your whims. You choose where you’re heading, and the chances are that you can reach it.
Feline Better Together
The second trump card is that Pawbay is playable entirely in splitscreen, couch co-op. You can obviously play it solo, but we got the greatest mileage out of Pawbay by playing together. We’d keep to the same general district – the market or park, perhaps – but we’d split up and try to tick off tasks independently. Interrupting ten dinners or sitting with three grandmas on a bench became less onerous when we were contributing together.
These two factors push Pawbay away from a lot of the other cat sims out there. You’re forever gated in the excellent Little Kitty, Big City, and you don’t get to play co-op in games like Stray. Pawbay has found its unique-selling-points and employs them well. Pawbay may not be as artful, clever or specifically authored as those games are, but the freedom does give it its own niche.
There isn’t a grand objective in Pawbay. You start the game with a shopping list of tasks, sorted by district of the town. You can choose to systematically tick these off, or you can tinker around with the moveset and explore the world, completing the odd task as you go. We opted for the latter and thought we were better off for it. There are some tasks that are more hidden than others (finding a witch’s room, for example) and a systematic approach will lead to frustration. It’s best to be surprised when you stumble across them.
A Little Like Playing an MMMeowRPG
The tasks are a little like a cat-based MMO. They tend to be ‘do X thing Y number of times’, and there will be one of those tasks for each district. You’re not just disrupting chess games or breaking bottles once, you’re doing it in pretty much every district, which gives Pawbay a slightly repetitive feel. The smaller positive is that, whenever you see a grandma on a bench you will know to sit next to her, but the larger negative is that the regions merge into one, and you begin wishing that there were more set pieces in among the copy+paste quests.
Not that there aren’t set-piece quests: there just weren’t as many as we would have liked. The hidden alley and witch’s house are neatly unexpected, and the game’s stars – a collectible which unlocks hats and sunglasses from the main menu – are often tucked into the most out-of-the-way places, making it a genuine achievement when you find them.
Navigation around Pawbay is a bit of a mixed bag. You can leap from window sill to signpost to canopy, but each jump is context-locked. You have to be standing in a specific location, aiming in a specific manner, for an ‘A’ prompt to appear, allowing you to jump. You can’t just fall off a rooftop: you have to find a platform beneath you that is close enough to drop onto, and then hope that the ‘A’ appears again.
Press A to Drink Milk
We can understand why Commando Panda have done it this way: it ensures the player doesn’t get themselves stuck, or teeters and falls off narrow planks when they just want to get to the other side. It also means that you don’t have cats swan-diving off five-storey buildings. But it does have significant downsides. A game that has built itself on being free and sandboxy has suddenly had a sequence of limits placed on it. You can’t climb every box or canopy, because Pawbay won’t let you. You can’t drop down to that interesting area, because the design has deemed it too far away.
Oddly enough, in our case, it wasn’t the climbing that hurt us the most, it was the getting down. Feats like reaching the tallest location in a region should be a fantastic moment, Assassin’s Creed style. They should feel rewarding. But mostly I was annoyed that I had to retrace my steps. It can take minutes to get back to ground-level, simply because Pawbay doesn’t want you dashing your cat onto the cobbles below.
The result is that Pawbay felt stiff to us, reliant on contextual prompts when we wanted to be gallivanting after pigeons and mice. But even among that stiffness, there are still opportunities to have fun.
Pressing X makes your cat perform a laconic swipe, so you can knock bottles and glasses off tables. Pawbay isn’t as anarchic as Catlateral Damage: Remeowstered in terms of destruction, but there definitely is the opportunity to make a mess. Some of the interactions are lovely, too. We like tripping up children who have the zoomies, and there’s a strange joy from setting your cat’s tail on fire.
More a Kitten Than Full-Grown Cat
Pawbay is shorter and more confined than we expected. It’s possible to cross the town in a couple of minutes, and completion of the game – minus the odd star or red lantern – is somewhere around the three hour mark. Game-length is a messy subject nowadays (some people like a short game as they’re time-strapped, while others are militant that they should get a certain number of hours for their £s), but even to us, £17.99 seemed steep.
Which leaves Pawbay in an odd place. It’s a sandbox, but a small one. It prioritises freedom, giving you the keys to a town and no limits to how you explore it; but the controls stop you short of doing what you want, locking you behind contextual prompts. It’s a fun burst of cat gameplay, but you have to pay £17.99 for the privilege. The only part of Pawbay that doesn’t come with a caveat is the co-op, splitscreen play. It’s awesome.
If you wish cat sims on the Xbox would stop blocking you from exploring and, you know, acting like a cat, then Pawbay might be your saucer of milk. But it comes with its own problems, not least some control limitations and a tiny game world.
Important Links
Pawbay – It’s Time To Cause Some Feline Chaos – https://www.thexboxhub.com/pawbay-its-time-to-cause-some-feline-chaos/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/pawbay/9nk8cqllvsj2
