Stray Cat Doors is a colorful and charming escapes room game on Nintendo Switch that I highly recommend you play. Find out why in our Stray Cat Doors review!
Stray Cat Doors is billed as an escape game, and what that means is that for each stage you will need to interact with the objects on the screen to find the pieces of a cat that are needed to escape the room. Why? Because the cat will act as a key to open the door that has a lock in the shape of a cat… duh! The game will get you going with a short tutorial in which you’ll learn that you should collect items to add them to your inventory so that you can then use them to solve small puzzles that will bring you one step closer to your goal.
For you to understand how this one will present itself to players, allow me to spoil a bit of the first stage in the game. You will be in front of a gate that leads to a yard in front of a house. There will be a key on the floor, which you can collect to then use on the front gate. Before you go into the yard, you might notice a trashcan on the right side of the area. If you click on it, you will zoom in on that spot and will see that the trashcan has some sort of lock that requires you to correctly select four shapes on it.
Now, to find the solution to this puzzle, you will need to get closer to the house so that you can zoom in on the right side of it and collect a bell for a bicycle that, for some reason, is inside of a pair of rain boots. Turns out that once you add the bell to the bike, you’ll be able to ring it to make a pair of nearby frogs leap out of the way after being scared by the noise, and you will then realize that they were actually standing on top of a piece of paper that displays the combination for the lock on the trashcan. Once you go back to the trashcan and open the lock, you’ll be rewarded with the first of the cat pieces you need to get the cat that will open the door with the cat lock.
While you can play the game with the Switch docked, Stray Cat Doors kindly suggests that you play the game in Portable Mode with the touchscreen on the Nintendo Switch, which will flip the image vertically so that you can have a better experience – this makes sense since the game was originally released for mobile. If you decide to play on your TV, or while in Portable or Tabletop Mode without flipping the screen, you’ll get to move a cursor around the screen either with the right Joy-Con’s motion controls, pressing A to touch or execute and B to close, or you can play with both Joy-con and move the cursor around with the left analog stick.
Stray Cat Doors is a very charming and relaxing escape room puzzle game on Nintendo Switch that was a lot of fun to play for this review. If you have experience with escape games, then you can probably complete this one in an hour or so, but younger players or those new to the genre might need some extra time to find all the solutions. The good news is that if you ever get stuck, you can go into the settings menu by clicking/touching the gear in the corner of the screen to receive a hint. If the hint is still not enough for you, then you can click on answer to get the answer the hint, well, hinted at! So if you’re in the mood for a relaxing puzzle experience, be sure to give this $2.59 release a go!
Disclaimer
This Stray Cat Doors review is based on a Nintendo Switch copy provided by PULSMO.
