cats. They are so hot right now. With the release of Stray on the PS5, it’s a very good or a very bad time to release a furry feline adventure. We’re going for ‘a really good time’, as Xbox is unfortunately out of Stray for the time being.
But while Stray’s joy comes from giving you a world and letting you go, roaming free like any cat would, Bright Paw: Definitive Edition has the opposite impulse. This is less of an adventure and more of a puzzle game, set in claustrophobic corridors rather than sprawling cities. You can’t go where you want; you can only go where a set of cards tells you. At first glance, it may seem very anti-cat.
Bright Paw: Definitive Edition reminds us of coding games for kids, or – if you’re of a certain age and nerdy disposition – board games like Richard Garfield’s RoboRally. You start a level at one end of a grid of squares. At the bottom of the screen you have a hand of cards and those cards show a very specific movement pattern. One card can bring your cat forward a single square, while the other may look more tetris-esque, moving you forward, hanging to the right, and then turning left again. You play cards from your hand and the cat – Theo – moves according to the shape it says.
If you hit a wall, or the shape doesn’t fit in the arena, you can’t play the card. You stand there. To complicate matters further, there are obstacles scattered around. Conveyor belts push you in one direction, one square per turn. Pressure pads lower bridges; enemies follow patrol routes; lasers beam through the arena one time and blast away the next. Which card you play on which turn is paramount, and you need a certain foresight to decide whether to hold onto that cool four squares forward card or play it now.
Mistakes are not expensive at all. Death is common in Bright Paw: Definitive Edition, but there’s a handy rewind button that lets you rewind your moves one at a time. A full reset button allows you to rewind a deplorable set of moves. Playing Bright Paw: Definitive Edition is a breeze because it feels so fully featured. Everything you would want to complete a puzzle is given to you.
As the levels progress, this simple template takes on some rather fantastic skills. Theo gains the ability to blink from one square to another, or drop a psionic block onto pressure pads. Bright Paw: Definitive Edition is good at stacking skills on a shaky tower to see if you can balance things out.
A slightly left-wing addition that we’re not convinced works is a ‘where’s wally?’ mechanic. Each level there are two to three items in the environment that you can drag the cursor to. Tapping it will give you a little bit of story so you can build up what happened in the labs and robot factories you’re exploring. They also happen to be the game’s collectibles, giving you the lion’s share of Gamerscore. But they’re also completely separate from the main gameplay, and switching from board games to doing hidden objections is a bit jarring.
These narrative tidbits are here because Bright Paw: Definitive Edition lays out its story fairly thickly. You start the game in the apartment you live in and never strayed from, only to find that your owners – Nathaniel and Lauren – have been brutally murdered. Then you dive into some vents to find out that your house isn’t really a house: it’s the top tier of a lab complex. Stranger still, the voice of Nathaniel, your owner, rattles around your head like an omniscient narrator.
The story develops level by level becoming a mix of murder mystery and corporate espionage thriller as you try to figure out who killed your owners while also discovering what their company, Bright Paw, has been up to. As the story goes, it’s slightly above average, with some neat plot pivots, but too enthusiastic voice acting to bring you back to the ground.
It’s clear that the designers enjoyed their time playing Portal and Portal 2. The sarky, bitter narrator has all the hallmarks of Wheatley, and the smiley robots after your blood could have been ripped straight from the portal rooms. Graffiti on the walls doesn’t stop at writing ‘the cake is a lie’, but you can imagine the writers were tempted. It falters at being at liberal with its love for Valve’s series (Paw-tal, anyone?), but the overall presentation is slick nonetheless – much slicker than a small development team could muster. For a game with such a simple mechanism at its core (this could have been reduced to some) Thomas was alonestyle blocks and it would have worked), it’s impressive that so much care and AAA effort went into its presentation.
Bright Paw: Definitive Edition has nine sets of levels to offer, and they never quite bare their teeth. That’s left to the packaged DLC levels, which is why Bright Paw has “Definitive Edition” in the title. The difference is staggering: these levels are intricate, fiendish little traps that you must have at the top of your game to beat. Where the campaign is a bit on the easy side – too easy, we’d say, because the cards you can play in any given situation are extremely limited, forcing your hand – these levels dampen that criticism.
We’ve come to love Bright Paw: Definitive Edition. At first it all felt a bit too regressive. There was the Portal stuff, but the bigger problem was that the puzzles couldn’t make our brains buzz. More often than not, you have five possible cards to play, but only one or two of them would be feasible at any one time. One card could kill you while another would run you into a wall. So you go through the moves, wondering when the challenge might come. And this goes on for dozens of levels. We started to wonder if Bright Paw: Definitive Edition was ideal as a programming guide of sorts for our youngest children, rather than something we could play.
But very slowly things started to align. It’s not just about the cards in your hand, it’s about the powers you use, the blocks you push with your psionic abilities. Bright Paw: Definitive Edition is finally getting layers, and there’s an argument that it’s getting them too late. But as the plot accelerated and the puzzling gears started shifting past “first,” we found we couldn’t put it down. In fact, the extra levels made us cheeky, showing that we had taken the campaign for granted.
Bright Paw: Definitive Edition is not Stray. It is a single player board game where a lack of freedom of movement is the point: where you are to the whims of the cards in your hand. The cumbersome gameplay and very, very gradual difficulty may lose some admirers, but if you show him some patience and love, this cat is extremely charming and rewarding.
You can buy Bright Paw: Definitive Edition at the Xbox store
cats. They are so hot right now. With the release of Stray on the PS5, it’s a very good or a very bad time to release a furry feline adventure. We’re going for ‘a really good time’, as Xbox is unfortunately out of Stray for the time being. But while Stray’s joy comes in giving you a world and letting you enter it, roaming freely in it like any cat would, Bright Paw: Definitive Edition has the opposite impulse. This is less of an adventure and more of a puzzle game, set in claustrophobic corridors rather than sprawling…
Bright Paw: Final Edition Review
Bright Paw: Final Edition Review
2022-07-31
Dave Ozzy
Advantages:
- Tightly presented
- The extra levels are devilish
- Simple and unusual card movement mechanism
cons:
- Takes a long time to get challenging
- The Portal love-in is a little too obvious
- Maybe too slow for some
Information:
- Thank you for the free copy of the game go to – Rogue Games
- Formats – Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PS4, PS5, PC, Switch
- Version Reviewed – Xbox Series X
- Release Date – July 28, 2022
- Introductory price from – £10.99
TXH score
4/5
Advantages:
- Tightly presented
- The extra levels are devilish
- Simple and unusual card movement mechanism
cons:
- Takes a long time to get challenging
- The Portal love-in is a little too obvious
- Maybe too slow for some
Information:
- Thank you for the free copy of the game go to – Rogue Games
- Formats – Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PS4, PS5, PC, Switch
- Version Reviewed – Xbox Series X
- Release Date – July 28, 2022
- Introductory price from – £10.99
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