Cat Quest 3 Review: Fun-Sized Action-RPG With Style

Cat Quest 3 is an open-world RPG about a purrsair cat and their friend, who is pawsibly dead. Beyond its obsession with cat puns and cutesy aesthetics, the most striking feature of the game is its world. The whole adventure (with some intermissions) takes place on the figure-sized world map. Some islands can take a single second to travel between, and sailing reveals the longitude and latitude lines you’d expect to see on a nautical map.

The result is both pretty and useful, as it makes travel go by smoothly and fast. This is very important, as the game is built of a plethora of small activities that would be wholly incompatible with the large world maps of most action RPGs.

But let’s go back to those cat puns.

A World of Puns

Cat Quest 3 is full of puns, but you could gather as much by watching the trailer. It’s hard to explain just how pervasive the cat puns are, but an example might work. Keep in mind that the example isn’t from the game.

Let’s take the following conversation: “How are you feline today? Right meow, I’m purrfectly well.” How does that make you feel? Clawful, or merely unfurtunate? Certainly not pawsome. Now imagine if the fur review was like that. You might think that the puns are clawver but a little annoying, or that they’re a shield for purr litteracy. What a cat-astrophe. Purrease take me out of my meowsery.

Cat Quest 3 doesn’t always overdo its puns in this manner; only occasionally. On those occasions, the puns do get annoying, but they never undermine the game’s story. It’s hard to undermine a game that is this laissez-faire with its story.

A Story of Pi-Rats and Purrivateers

Cat Quest 3’s story rarely has any stakes. To be precise, it never takes those stakes to their natural conclusion. Even when an important enemy loses the final confrontation with the protagonist, or when the final boss is revealed in all its supposed world-shattering glory, the resolution seems to have little consequence. And that’s fine.

Most quests, including most main story boss fights, end with the losing party realizing that the real treasure is the friends we made along the way and giving up on their rivalry with the protagonist. It might be the game’s endlessly cheerful tone, or the puns getting to my head, but I found this resolution charming every time. Not all happy endings are created equal, and some feel more than a little forced, but they’re all worth going through the game to see. And besides, I doubt you’ll be playing Cat Quest 3 for the story.

A consequence of making a game filled with short one-off adventures is that few of those stories get to be fully developed. The result is that Cat Quest 3 is full of great little ideas, but none of those gets to the end carrying the punch they should. I loved helping Clawford the ghost remember his life, letting him reach his lover on the other side. I would have loved it even more if I had known them a little better by the end, perhaps then I would have felt something more than a vague sense of helpfulness.

That said, if Cat Quest 3 hadn’t been divided into a million tiny activities there might not have been a Clawford to help. If the game didn’t have dozens of treasure hunts, there wouldn’t have been space for the Purrmaid (cat mermaid) and her Shell Phone. You can’t have everything, and all things considered, I think Cat Quest 3 choose its priorities correctly.

Cat Quest 3 as an RPG

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Cat Quest 3 is how deep its RPG component can be. I don’t mean this as an insult, but the cutesy presentation makes this game look more like a mobile Gacha A-RPG than Elden Ring. What we have here is instead a mix of actual RPG mechanics with the ease of use one would expect of a game aimed, though not exclusively, at children.

When you level up, you don’t assign points to stats in Cat Quest 3. Your stats all level up by themselves. What you can do is equip armor pieces, trinkets, and weapons, and level them up as you wish. The trick is in how peculiar most pieces of equipment are, as few of them are limited to a stat boost, and in all the secret combinations they offer.

Here’s an example. You find a piece of armor that damages nearby enemies when you’re healing. Will this effect stack with the same effect granted by another item? Yes. Will your damage increase as you boost your healing power? Of course. Will this item activate when you use the shield that heals you when you block or the item that regenerates health when you’re in water? You don’t even need to ask.

Cat Quest 3 is probably too simple to scratch the same itch of a dedicated RPG, but it’s satisfying in just the same way. It understands that having a completely broken build is fun, especially if that build starts losing speed as the game goes on and you need to periodically find a new one.

Cat Quest 3: The Bottom Line

Pros:

• Simple but solid action and RPG elements
• Exploration is rewarding and doesn’t overstay its welcome
• Looks adorable

Cons:

• The puns can get annoying
• Some side stories could have used more development
• Low stakes undermine the grandiose elements of the story

Cat Quest 3 is a simple but exciting action RPG that forgoes the typical epic scale of the genre to focus on short, unique challenges. But while it’s certainly great for short play sessions, its length (about 10 hours), fun recurring characters, and satisfying player progression make it worthwhile beyond those sprouts of action.

Gameplay tested on PC through Steam. Review code provided by Kepler Interactive.