Cat Crisis

A stealth game where the player character is the vulnerable one

Most stealth games put you in control of someone dangerous who is choosing not to be seen. Cat Crisis flips that: you are a housecat, the dogs patrolling the level are bigger than you in every sense that matters, and the entire skill of the game is reading a room you have no way to fight your way out of. That's a sharper hook than "cute cat game" suggests, and it's the thing that separates Cat Crisis from the pile of animal-themed party games it could easily have been mistaken for on a storefront thumbnail.

The loop, per the store's own description, runs in two halves. Inside a level you're sneaking under furniture, freezing when a dog is near, and occasionally leaning into pure chaos — throwing bombs, tripping traps, or mashing a dedicated "meow" button when subtlety stops being the plan. Breaking vases and rescuing kittens earns cash, which is spent between missions on crossbows, grenades and time bubbles. It's a familiar roguelite shape — clear a run, shop, go again, harder — but built around a character with no combat option worth the name, which keeps the tension pointed at avoidance rather than at a gear check.

Petting as a fail state, not just a victory lap

The detail worth calling out is how the game treats the moment you actually reach a kitten. Pet it gently and it calms down; pet it "too hard (or smack it, you monster)," in the developer's own words, and it panics and jumps back out of your arms. That's a small piece of friction in what could have been a pure collection mechanic, and it matters because it means the rescue itself carries risk, not just the sneaking that gets you there. Whether that friction feels satisfying over a full run — rather than fiddly — is exactly the kind of thing a single 44-minute review can't yet settle either way.

A side project from a studio with a real co-op track record

Cat Crisis isn't a solo debut appearing from nowhere. Treehouse Games is a Los Angeles studio co-founded by Michael Chu and Ryan Sullivan that raised a reported $2.6 million in seed funding, and its main title, Voyagers of Nera — a cooperative survival-crafting game for up to ten players — has been in Early Access since September 2025 and sits at Very Positive across 2,583 reviews. The team's own launch announcement for Cat Crisis is candid about what this is: "a fun side project for a couple members of our team" after years on the bigger game, built and shipped alongside it rather than instead of it. That context is worth having, because it changes what a buyer should expect — not a studio's flagship bet, but a small, contained co-op game from people who have already shipped one well-liked multiplayer title.

It also explains the shape of the release. There's no in-game store, no DLC, and the price is NZ$4.79 before a 34% launch discount brings it to NZ$3.16 (US$2.99 down to US$1.97) — a genuinely low-commitment ask that matches a scoped side project rather than a game trying to fund itself through post-launch spending.

What can't be checked yet

Two things this review would normally lean on are both unavailable. There's no achievement list configured for Cat Crisis at all, which removes the usual way of checking a roguelite's claim about escalating difficulty against real completion data — on most games in this library, an achievement curve is the cheapest way to tell "people found it too hard" from "people finished it and moved on." And the review corpus is a single English review, positive, from a player 44 minutes in, who called it "very cute" and said they were already sold on buying whatever Treehouse makes next. That's a real, specific reaction, but it's one player at under an hour, not a pattern. A concurrent-player check at the time of writing also returned zero players online — a single dated snapshot rather than evidence of anything ongoing, but worth naming rather than ignoring on a review published two days after launch.

None of that is unusual for a day-one release, and none of it is a mark against the game itself. It just means the specific things a buyer would want confirmed — how the difficulty curve actually plays out over several runs, whether four strangers can matchmake as easily as a pre-formed group, how long a typical session runs — aren't yet answerable from outside sources, and this review says so rather than guessing.

Final verdict

Cat Crisis earns a 6.5 for a genuinely distinctive pitch — first-person stealth played from the losing end of the predator-prey relationship, wrapped in a roguelite shop that gives runs a reason to escalate — built by a team that has already shown it can ship a well-liked co-op game. It doesn't score higher because the things that would confirm the pitch holds up over more than one sitting — the difficulty curve, session length, how matchmaking with strangers actually feels — currently rest on a single enthusiastic review and the store page's own claims, with no achievement data to check any of it against independently. At a launch price under NZ$3.20, the risk of trying it with friends is small; buy it now if a small co-op group wants something silly and specific for an evening, and wait for the review count to climb if you want outside confirmation the loop has legs before you commit.