On one hand, Cat Lady is a unique and interesting labor of love. On the other, it's dull, ugly, boring and amateurish. The whole thing feels like something a very talented moody teenager made in the late-90s. There's potential here for sure, but it's got a long way to be realized. The story is easily the strongest element. It's unique and told quite creatively, but it never really quite gets there. Sometimes it goes to painstaking lengths to develop characters and situations, others, it just drops stuff in with no explanation at all (ie, the Carpenter). It's hard to say more without spoiling, but suffice it to say, the story-telling is uneven. The acting is solid and the writing not bad. Puzzles are mostly straightforward and easy - there were only a few times I was stumped for more than a minute or 2. The bigger gameplay issue is that you'll spend far more of your time sitting and listening to dialogue than you will actually playing and problem-solving. I don't mind a game that's more interactive fiction than game, but there are many, MANY long stretches of time that have you staring at a near static image on the screen while VERY long conversations play out. Conversations in which you'll only have a minimum of interaction every once in a very great while. At the very least, change up the camera angles. Move things around. Make the visuals dynamic. Make something, ANYTHING happen on screen. The other huge problem is that what does happen visually is terrible. This is simply one of the ugliest games I've ever played. I'm very sympathetic to budget limitations, and the fact that the game is going for a depressed, muted tone, but Cat Lady is about as visually miserable as a game can get, and has some of the most laughably bad animation I've ever seen. Ultimately, this is a weak game that's not strong enough on story to justify its gameplay issues. There's a lot of ambition and potential here, but it just doesn't work.
I know this game is oddly beloved by many, but sad to say, it's really not very good, and absolutely pales in comparison with its predecessors. While the art and sound are fantastic (aside from Guybrush's awful new look), the jokes are often weak, the puzzles mostly unimpressive, and the world claustrophobically small. It's not a bad game, but it's such a catastrophic drop from the perfection of MI1 and 2 that it comes off much worse that it actually is. Worst aspect: the long, painfully boring, incredibly unfunny, un-challenging, extremely derivative section of rhyming-insult-sword-fighting. The designers took what had been a stroke of pure genius from the first game and rehashed it into an agonizingly slow exercise in insipidity. Make sure you bring a pillow with you as you snore through the repetitive animations and poor line-readings of lame rhymes that hardly qualify as jokes as you slowly build up your arsenal of comebacks and weaponry in a dumbed down combination of MI1 and Sid Meier's Pirates. The other big issue is simply the difficult transition that Adventure games struggled with at this time as they were forced to shift from the format of reading dialogue to having it voice-acted. Really, nothing did more to kill the genre than this shift, as you're left with nothing to do but twiddle your thumbs as voice-actors of extremely varying quality slowly read lines that you could have read yourself far quicker (and better in your own mind. Plus no matter how good the acting, it's always hard to reconcile the way voice-actors portray characters with the way you'd been hearing them in your own head for years already. Sigh. Such a shame. Still, the game is not without its merits. There are fun bits sprinkled here and there, even a few inspired moments. And of course, there's Murray - easily the best thing about MI in its post-Gilbert era. Play it yes. But don't expect to love it.
