What I’m playing 🐈🍞 CATO | cat + toast = puzzles

CATO is that old nerd joke about cats and toast turned into a puzzle platformer. Cats always land on their feet, but buttered toast always lands butter-side down, so if you strap them together…

I found CATO through a Steam Next Fest in 2024. The first few levels in that demo were promising enough to get me to wishlist the game.

CATO is in a corner of the puzzle game genre I like to call “single-player co-op” since you control two characters at the same time. The cat can run and climb but can’t jump, while the toast can jump sideways and up walls but is helpless on ice. When the two are assembled together, their abilities are combined and they also gain infinite jumps. Almost all puzzles in the game involve splitting up and reassembling at the right times.

There’s also a basic plot about running out of milk and going out to get more. For a puzzle game, that’s enough of an excuse to get the game started. Story is obviously not the reason a puzzle game fan would play this.

Smart puzzle design

I consider the puzzle design in CATO to be exceptionally smart, yet understandable. The levels are laid out so it’s easy to tell what they want you to achieve, with each major step of the puzzle placed in a different part of the screen, so you only need to worry about how to solve it and not what your objective even is. While these are often multiple simple steps, the challenge is completing them all at the same time. The most interesting levels remind me of community-made advanced levels for Portal 2, where it’s often easy to just reach the exit but tricky to get there with the door held open. A small number of puzzles instead focus on execution challenges, like sensitive timing, but these are thankfully rare.

The game gently teaches its mechanics with just level design and no text. That’s the ideal execution of a tutorial, on the level of the greats. It follows the classic pattern: you first get a very easy puzzle using the mechanic, then the puzzle repeats, each time with an extra twist added that makes it harder, guiding you to discover the mechanic’s nuances. The game makes good use of its mechanics, exploring each deeply, and in later levels, starts combining them and challenging you to understand how they interact.

There are mechanics like:

• Walls that become solid if the cat is carrying the toast!
• Cheese that is bouncy for the cat but sticky for the toast!
• High-speed pipe transport!
• Multiple toasts!

Overall, CATO isn’t too hard of a puzzle game, but there definitely were a few levels that had me sitting still, thinking for a while. There’s also a hint system available for most levels, which marks the important places in a level.

Action breaks

The final level of each of the five worlds is an action-focused level instead of a puzzle. Some are runner-style platformers, like Canabalt, which have you dodging obstacles while sliding to the exit. Others are boss fights that feature the main mechanic of that world as the key to beating the boss. None are really that difficult, but they’re an adequate change of pace after playing a long chain of puzzle levels. Although five worlds sounds somewhat few, each actually has a lot of levels — about 30 or so in each.

Looks

The art style of the game is pretty interesting. It imitates chunky pixel art with 3D graphics, while maintaining the flat, two-tone shading to sell the pixel art look. But with its 3D art, it gets to have very smooth animations and detailed environments.

Without the obviously artificial pixelation effect, this would have been fine, but unremarkable 3D art. Without the 3D, there may not have been the smoothness in the animation or the flexibility to zoom in and out to appropriately fit levels on screen.

Also, there are skins!

Don’t worry, they don’t require any money or grinding. You unlock them as rewards for finding in-game secrets. There are separate skins for the cat and the toast, but I find the default toast to be too much fun to switch off of. Despite that, getting these secrets is relevant for achieving…

One hundred percent!

I liked CATO so much I decided to 100% it. I consider this a great honour for a game, since I so rarely bother with full completion. (The previous time I did so was with Grapple Dog in 2023.) That involved finding all the secrets throughout the game. On the level select map, some level icons have a mark indicating there’s a secret there. Some secrets just involve going into a hidden passageway, like in Doom or Quake, but accessing others requires using a level’s puzzle elements in a counterintuitive way to get the cat and toast into an obscure corner of the level.

Some secrets just contain unlockable skins or easter eggs, but some actually lead to additional, secret levels. More interestingly, they feature a special mechanic that only appears in these secret levels! If you never go for secrets, you would never even know about this mechanic. (Of course, I won’t be giving away what this mechanic is.) Most of these secret levels have a similar difficulty as the main levels, but the ones near the end of the game get particularly hard, involving clever usage of the secret mechanic in combination with the other mechanics.