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mysterytoastCattails: Wildwood Story
Began: 8/18/2025Main Story Completed (31/60 achievements): 9/15/2025
Current Playtime (main story complete, 38/60 achievements): 17.4 hours
Obtained via Humble Bundle’s 2024 Down on the Farm bundle.
This game is… neither how it describes itself, nor how reviewers describe it. It’s not really “Stardew Valley with cats,” unless you conflate the existence of various systems while ignoring the depth of each of them. On the Harvest Moon to Stardew to Rune Factory scale, I’d place Cattails as between Stardew and Rune Factory. On the triangle scale of farming/colony sim/RPG, I would place Cattails as leaning slightly more towards the colony sim and RPG corners. And if I compare it to one specific game, I’d place it somewhat close to Rune Factory 4's gameplay loop, with a more involved management system and a less complex combat system.
To describe Cattails on its own merits, then, it is mostly an RPG with some colony management. You go out into the map and collect herbs and catch prey, which you consume (there’s also a hunger meter), donate for colony upgrades/buffs, and submit to recruit more cats to your colony. Recruiting cats unlocks classic fighting-and-puzzles dungeons, which progress the plot. Every day you can also send out your own squads of cats to fight the shadow cats, claim territory (afaik you must participate in battle to seize territory), and collect resources from your territory.
Overall, pretty ok. It does a lot of things, and most of those systems feel a bit shallow. Despite the rival marriage system and the large cast, there’s not much in terms of character interactions, and there are so many characters I had to choose who to focus on based on surface level impressions. The festival games are creative, but there’s only two per festival, and only one festival per season. Combat consists of one attack button and skills, and is a simple cycle of using charge attacks, dodging, and using skills. Everything about the colony is self-sufficient and ultimately requires no input from you except for upgrades. It does not scratch that “play as a Warrior Cat” itch by any means, but that’s honestly more an issue of me playing the wrong game — the first Cattails game and their older Warrior Cats Untold Tales game are probably closer to what I’m looking for. Plus the former Roblox game (not the official one). It is still enjoyable on its own, and I liked just hoarding resources and capturing territory.
Technically I’ve finished the main game, but I’m slowly grinding at the achievements. I don’t quite have the stamina to finish all 3 mines (I finished one) and I probably don’t feel like doing the invasion relic, but otherwise everything seems relatively attainable. I’m most of the way there on territory, and I’m slowly working on all the relationship achievements.
LUNA
Began: 9/25/2025Completed: 9/30/2025
Playtime (main story perfect ending, 10/18 achievements): 8.7 hours
Bought during the release sale.
This is a surprisingly sweet hentai game. I bought this game because of the noncon, and there certainly was a lot of noncon. But behind the initial vibes is actually rather involved worldbuilding, and a plot that doesn't feel dialed in. I also found it surprising that none of the main villain characters were actually evil. Yeah, tragic villains traumadumping on you is a common trope, but these ones act in ways informed by their trauma, and when their goals align with the protagonist's they support the protagonist instead. I think there was only one h-scene that actually involved the actual antagonist group, and it was presented as a deeply traumatizing event. The endings definitely have a "this is the good ending, these are the bad endings" vibe to them, but the bad endings are fun mindbreak scenarios so I'm not really bothered by that.
There was also a large amount of yuri. Including one budding couple, and a lot of menacing yuri vibes. I'm a bit disappointed that it goes from Luna being menaced to the one doing the menacing, but whatever. I was a bit concerned that any yuri would be exclusively for fanservice, but if it is fanservice the writing is also genuinely invested in the emotional dynamics.
Gameplay-wise, it's pretty unremarkable as a card game. More involved than a visual novel, certainly, but you can make your deck strat as soon as you can customize it and then use it for the rest of the game. Personally, I went for a multihit+drones+bleed build and modified the deck as I progressed, and that worked fine for every fight, even the ones with the mininum damage shield (bleed is extremely overpowered). Even though the game wasn't overly difficult, it was engaging enough to be a nice reprieve from the visual novel aspects.
As some reviewer said, I came for the "plot" and stayed for the actual plot.
…Granted, I also stayed for the "plot."
Witchspring R: The Follower's Fall (Epilogue)
Began: 10/24/2025Completed: 10/28/2025
Playtime (7/7 epilogue achievements): 9.7 hours
Free DLC for Witchspring R. This adds an epilogue (as a separate, data-transferred mode), which includes several hours of additional content. There's a fairly substantial amount of story and lore, especially revolving around Jude and the temple lords. Apparently transferring to the epilogue also unlocks NG+ content, so I suspect all the new non-story and sidequest superbosses were from that.
I suppose this was the expected outcome of doing a post-game story for a game where you're expected to max out your levels before the final boss and where every level gained is a substantial upgrade, but I felt this was a very boss-oriented story. Sure, there were several sidequests, and a long new map, but any difficulty from the story itself came more from adjusting to the fight gimmicks, and less actual difficulty. The puzzles were relatively easy (except for the one where I missed what the goal was and did the opposite solution), and the bosses were decent in difficulty. The reprisal of the ignore defense boss was mostly an annoyance because I was fully in a magic build at that point and just brute forced the fight. The most fun boss was the "normal" final boss of the epilogue -- I really enjoyed that it was mainly a cinematic fight alongside the temple lords. The most difficult fight, and the only one I restarted multiple times, was Ludina. For once I actually couldn't use my general purpose (dark magic resistant) arsenal, and had to change my gear and actually customize my abilities to maximize my damage output, and that was a pretty novel experience. The post-post-epilogue was the least fun in terms of actually reaching the fights. Whoever thought "the boss trigger is in a random spot on a pitch-black map with no directions" was a good idea missed the mark completely.
Speaking of sidequests, I really liked them. There was a lot of stuff about seeing how people were doing after the game. I was particularly fond of Alfredo's story, and seeing how Vavelia and Lalaque were doing. This wasn't connected to an achievement, but I really liked the bonus conversations with the temple lords, since they didn't get much screentime in the base game. Overall, it was enjoyable, and wasn't even that difficult to get back into compared to other games even on hard difficulty, perhaps because I had already completed all relevant stat growth beforehand (I was tempted to turn the difficulty down for Ludina but I beat her before I gave up).
Hidden in my Paradise
Began: 11/18/2025Completed: 11/23/2025
Playtime (100% achievements): 4.1 hours
Purchased as part of a Fanatical Build your own Cozy Games Bundle.
A short hidden objects game with a cute artstyle, made by the same team that did A Tiny Sticker Tale. Finding hidden objects is only one aspect of gameplay - you can also find fairies by moving certain objects and recreate pictures. The pictures are honestly more involved than the hidden objects.
I thought the difficulty of the pictures varied immensely from "pictures almost complete from the start" to "drag a dozen objects together," which was a bit annoying. What was more annoying was just how fickle the conditions were, where it requires all objects to be in frame and stacked on the correct object. The error for failing the photo conditions is a generic "something is missing," which was greatly unhelpful because sometimes nothing is missing and it's a different issue - I really would have liked a "something isn't positioned correctly" error, or some hint highlighting what object isn't being registered correctly (considering they already have a system to automatically recognize objects).
I spent a disproportionately large amount of time in the sandbox mode creating a level for the last achievement. The playerbase of this game is really small, I knew I ought to make something nice instead of throwing something at it. the sheer amount of variety in decorations you can use is nice, though it felt a bit silly that you can't actually unlock all objects just by 100%ing the rest of the game, including the seasonal levels. I believe 100% the regular and seasonal levels gives you enough gacha tickets and coins to fully unlock the base game's object shops, but you need to grind coins to get absolutely everything. At least the game is generous with giving you bonus coins every time you enter a level and click on an animal. That wedding level gave me around 100 coins each load.
Apparently this one is also getting a sequel? I'm… honestly probably not getting that one, unless it is part of a bundle again. The game was fine, just not anything so spectacular that I'd keep an eye on the sequel, but then this isn't typically my genre of game.
Organized Inside
Began: 11/23/2025Completed: 11/28/2025
Playtime (100% achievements): 5.2 hours
Bought during the initial release sale.
Another Unpacking-like game. This game's narrative focuses on a handful of characters, and a black cat that wanders between them being a cute nuisance as the characters go through life changes that require cleaning and organizing. This one was 20 levels long, with 3 hidden objects in each level unlocked by performing certain interactions.
This iteration is actually even more "pure" of an organizing concept than Unpacking. Whereas that game had a few levels where you squeezed in objects around existing objects you may or may not be able to move, every level here was full organization freedom. There was also one level of the inverse, packing up a room instead. It also featured the concept of storage objects, like document folders, tool boxes, and purses -- a few of them like purses allow for anything that fits, though for the most part they only fit specific objects and in a fixed configuration. I was a bit tired of the gameplay by the end, since there just wasn't that much variety, but it hadn't overstayed its welcome.
I guess my main complaint is how objects are initially laid out, as greyed out, collisionless objects until interacted with for the first time. It felt a bit like the devs were dissatisfied with how Unpacking did object reveals (with the boxes) and decided to have all objects be visible and ordered how the player wants, but didn't quite think through how this would feel in practice. I appreciated the sentiment but the fact that uninteracted objects blocked viewing space made it so I ended up just grabbing every object to move out of the way before actually organizing. On the bright side, that wasn't too tedious, because you can place objects out of bounds instead of awkwardly fitting things on the floor.
My secondary complaint is that the levels felt a bit too small. By that I mean, the dimensional space to place objects felt a tad cramped. This was particularly egregious for the food truck level, and a lesser extent the animal rescue store and camping levels. I couldn't quite make things fit the way I wanted, because there were just too many objects and not all could be sufficiently combined.
As a whole, though, this was a very enjoyable experience. I even went back (beyond my playtime here) to replay a few levels to try and improve on them.
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