Cat Meoir: Feline Detective

Introduction

Cat Meoir: Feline Detective casts players as a cat investigating its own owner's murder across an open-world recreation of early-1950s New York City, blending puzzle-solving with exploration and a noir-tinged mystery. Developed and published by Scratch and Claw Studios, it's been available free on Steam since 4 May 2024. Two years later, its 20 English-language reviews sit at 45% positive, Mixed. This review read all 11 negative reviews in that sample alongside a range of the positive side.

The same specific complaint, independently, again and again

What makes this small sample worth taking seriously is how precisely its central complaint recurs across reviewers with no apparent connection to each other. One reviewer describes the camera as "abysmal," causing "motion sickness" and clipping "through EVERYTHING in its path." A separate reviewer, independently, uses an almost identical description: "the camera works like butter in a hot pan." A third review references that exact phrase directly, confirming it as accurate rather than hyperbole. "I basically never get motion sickness... ever. This gave it to me within 3 minutes of starting," reads a fourth, describing "basically no settings" to adjust it. That's not a single frustrated player's exaggeration — it's the same specific, physically-real problem described in matching detail by reviewers who don't appear to be referencing each other.

A premise worth defending, even by critics

Despite that, this sample doesn't read as a rejection of the game's concept. "I can see the vision and I can recognize the effort that was put into it," reads one detailed negative review, praising the exploration-and-clues structure in theory while lamenting the camera undermines it in practice. Voice acting and the comic-panel cutscenes draw specific, repeated praise even from reviewers who otherwise can't recommend the game — "good voice acting and cute drawings in the cut scenes," reads one, alongside a note that the actual gameplay beneath those cutscenes is "block graphics" and "nothing intuitive." Puzzle signposting compounds the camera problem for several reviewers: "very little indication on what areas are interact-able," reads one, describing getting stuck at an early police-station section with no clear next step.

An unaddressed problem, two years on

Given how consistently and specifically the camera issue recurs, this review checked Scratch and Claw Studios' own public update history to see whether it had since been patched. The record shows nothing: no news posts, no patch notes, no updates of any kind since the game's original May 2024 release. That silence means the specific, independently-corroborated camera and motion-sickness issue driving most of this sample's negative verdicts has had over two years to be addressed and, as far as the public record shows, never was. A live concurrent-player check for this review returned zero.

Verdict

Cat Meoir: Feline Detective has a genuinely creative premise and cutscenes good enough to earn real praise even from players who couldn't get far into the game itself. But this review's full read of its negative-review sample turns up an unusually consistent, independently-corroborated, and apparently unpatched camera problem serious enough that multiple separate reviewers report actual motion sickness within minutes. Free removes the financial risk, but go in with modest expectations about how far you'll actually get to play it.