Cat Survivors

Cat Survivors is exactly what it sounds like if you know the genre it's borrowing from: a small black cat stands in a field, enemies close in from every side, and a weapon fires on its own while the only thing you actually control is where the cat stands. Survive, level up by walking into green XP bubbles, pick one of three upgrade cards each time you do, and the authors promise a "romantic ending" if you last the full ten minutes. It is, structurally, Vampire Survivors with a cat instead of a wizard, built to fit inside js13k 2025's 13-kilobyte size limit — and for a budget that tight, it's a genuinely complete little game rather than a tech demo with a timer.

The touch control is a real drag-anywhere joystick, and it works

This is a bullet-heaven, not a puzzle, so the control test that matters is whether the cat can actually be steered by touch while the screen fills with enemies — not just whether a menu button responds. It was tested directly with a real held drag dispatched through Chromium's touch pipeline (the correct way to test a virtual joystick, since a instant flick can't tell you whether a held, moving touch is tracked): dragging down, then right, then left, then down again each visibly moved the cat and scrolled the background, and the same session's kill counter and XP progress ("3 of 5", then a level-up) climbed exactly as they should while doing it. This isn't a fixed on-screen pad like some games on this shelf — it reads the touch position directly, the way the game's own description says it should ("Use touch screen virtual pad to move").

The level-up screen is a separate test, since it's a different input entirely: three cards drawn on the same canvas, tappable on touch or selectable with 1/2/3 on a keyboard. Tapping a card was confirmed working by watching the effect carry over: a weapon chosen on one level-up screen showed up already owned and ready to level further the next time the screen appeared, rather than the same three "New!" options resetting each time. Keyboard parity on desktop was confirmed the same way, holding W/A/S/D to move the cat around a wide arena exactly as the touch drag does on phone.

Familiar bones, a real amount of content on top

Past the opening minute, the upgrade cards started showing real variety — knives that home in on the aim direction, a boomerang that comes back, random-direction fireballs, a damage aura, and a bullet-count upgrade for an existing weapon — which is more build variety than a lot of full-sized browser games manage, let alone a 13-kilobyte one. None of this is a new idea; it's the Vampire Survivors template applied competently, with a cat skin and a genre the js13k competition sees a lot of every year. What earns it a place here is that the template is actually finished and the controls that make it playable on a phone are the real thing, not a decorative afterthought.

One thing worth taking seriously without having reproduced it directly: a js13k judge's own comment on the game's competition page says the endgame gets "extremely laggy." Testing for this review stayed in the opening couple of minutes, where performance was clean throughout, so that specific claim wasn't independently confirmed — but it's a first-hand account from someone who played a full run, not a guess, and a canvas full of enemies and projectiles is exactly where a tight byte budget usually starts to show its seams. A reader planning to chase the full ten minutes should go in expecting some slowdown late.

Final verdict

Cat Survivors doesn't try to be more than a well-made entry in an extremely crowded genre, and it doesn't need to be: the drag-to-move control was tested directly and it moves the cat, feeds it into fights, and lets you pick upgrades by touch exactly as the game claims, which is the one thing this shelf actually checks for. The lack of a licence file keeps it out of a higher tier of trust and the reported late-game lag is a real asterisk, but neither one is a reason to keep a working, free, ad-free action game off a shelf built for exactly this kind of thing. Recommended.