CATRAP

Nya!

Nobody in this system is a cat girl, but we know several cat girls quite well, hello to all of them! The story of Catrap is quite in-depth, and may be a little hard to keep up with: Catboy and Catgirl are walking through the Hunted Woods, they get turned into cat folk, and they have to solve 100 puzzles to win. Thrilling stuff. Honestly when we first saw the sprite art for the two characters on the menu screen we thought it was two girls, not a guy and a girl.

The game is a block pusher, but not from a top-down perspective like Sokoban. It’s side scrolling, and your goal is to kill ghosts and mummys. Mummys fall if the block under them is moved or destroyed, ghosts don’t. Bricks can be pushed, sand just dissolves. You can climb ladders vertically or horizontally like monkey bars. You can’t jump, but you can press A to reverse moves and, interestingly, B to unreverse. You can effectively rewind and, well not fast forward, just wind I guess, in this game. So if you messed up you can go back a few moves, and if you forget how you did it before you can go back before you move again.

You can play as either Catboy or Catgirl, very original names, and this has no impact on gameplay. Naturally we always played as Catgirl. Some of these stages really stumped us, again we aren’t the best at these sorts of puzzle games, but we can see ourselves coming back and trying to beat all of them. The game has basic but still cute sprite art, and the one music track that plays during gameplay is nice until it becomes grating by way of repetition. It’s funny that the game has a password system to save your progress, and has an input and output function on the homescreen, since it doesn’t automatically give you your password after each stage.

Where this game gets really interesting is the level editor. You can make your own levels, and share them via password! It’s pretty in-depth (for as basic a game as this is) and it’s nice that you can assign A and B to different tile types while you edit so you don’t have to switch as often. We made a level, and here’s the code if you want to try it out:

23OBF 32OQB E0A04 VF1A0 P3G41 82H5K J5M1C 1V8CM 592EA H5PWV MA

It took a full three minutes for us to input that password to check if it worked. We were in hysterics by the end just at the comical length of it, and by how many characters you can enter it seems they go up to 60. You know, if 52 characters isn’t big enough for you. For reference the sentence before this one was 52 characters. Kids on the playground in 1990 must have loved passing around 60 character passwords. Also, if you put in all zero’s this is what you get:

Overall Catrap is a fun game, and the perfect sort of pick up and play game for the Game Boy. We can imagine having this on a long car ride with lots of time to figure out the puzzles, then spending the rest making our own stupid levels. This is the best block pushing game so far, sorry Amazing Tater.