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Review
Please Do Not the Cat doesn't inspire confidence with his title, but fortunately, the vanishing word is deliberate, and the game's header throws in a verb between Not and The, describing -- well, what you need to do with the cat in the game, or the complete opposite. It's usually pretty clear which. The cat has jumped into your life, or more precisely, onto you while you were sleeping on your couch, through an open window. Please do not wake the cat.
You can't move, but actually, you can, to go look a few places around the couch. This gives the impression that things aren't going to be very realistic, but there's some quick humor here, and once you're able to move around, you realize you need to feed the cat and play with it a bit, so it's relaxed enough for, well ... I won't spoil it, but you can guess.
So there's some basic apartment game + needless surreality in the your basic apartment game, which meands PDNtC won't be high art, but it's fun enough to figure how to read the cat's collar or make friends or play with it. It's not a mean or dark game.
When looking through TALP games I hadn't reviewed, I immediately said "oh no" to this, but it's pretty well-contained, and despite some minor verb-guessing, it's not going to frustrate you, and certainly after a minute or two I was pretty convinced it wasn't. So I got through quickly. There are some alternate routes, and how to talk to the cat and capture it are rather cute. When it's over it's even a bit sad. So while PDNtC is a bit plain, it's also relatively rewarding, and it focuses on the right parts of a Your Apartment/slice of life game.
So it's the sort of game you may say hack no to, and there is some verb guessing, but it's nothing terribly painful account because the world is pretty well contained. You wind up doing things that cats like kind of like bringing them food or toys, and then it's over it's a bit sad, too, but it's the right ending. And it reminded me of various cats I'd made friends with, and the ways I'd made friends. So it may not have intended to have great range, but it was nice and homey and (I think) did for me what the author hoped.
