Little Kitty, Big City review

I'm not a cat person. Cats know this—they tend to watch me suspiciously from afar instead of being any sort of affectionate—but it took me mere seconds to decide that I would die for the titular kitty in Little Kitty, Big City. 

What is it? Doing little cat things in a big old world
Expect to pay:
Developer: Double Dagger Studio
Publisher: Double Dagger Studio
Reviewed on: Windows 11, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060, AMD Ryzen 9 4900HS, 16GB RAM
Multiplayer? No
Steam Deck: Verified
Link: Official site

What was I supposed to do, honestly, after they tumbled innocently from their windowsill into the big bad world, buffeted along by mercantile crows and grouchy Shiba Inus, baffled and lost and trying to find their way back to their nap spot? It’s a cute premise made even more charming by Kitty, a clumsy, darling four-legged everyman. Everything Kitty does is adorable, from the way they squeeze under gaps in walls to their scrambles in local trash cans. Even if the rest of the game were an empty box I'd still get plenty of character from Kitty's big green eyes and the way they shake their head indignantly when they run too fast into something.

Luckily, though, they're not forced to be cute in a vacuum—their inadvertent adventure out of doors provides plenty of opportunity to dip their toe beans into the big wide world. 

Or… the big-ish wide world. The map of the game really works out to be about the footprint of a single city block and its surroundings. Normally I’d worry that it would feel confined, but considering the scale of a cat (little), it feels like plenty to explore. The levels are built strategically to complement Kitty’s increasing climbing abilities, so street level gives way slowly to walls and then the tops of cars, houses, and the lower floors of apartment buildings.

More than once as I balanced precariously on an air vent, guileless passersby walking right below me, I thought, wow…. just like Dishonored…

But perhaps not quite. Where Corvo Attano is a creature of the