Review: Fort Meow

Fort Meow is an indie strategy and puzzle based game developed by Rhys Davies. This is my first time playing any games from Upper Class Walrus but I quite enjoyed Fort Meow and it has left a good impression. Fort Meow is a perfect game for anyone who has little time on their hand but want to complete an interactive story in one sitting.

Plot:

The story is about Nia, who has just moved to her grandparent’s house to visit them but there was no one in the house. She ends up finding her grand father’s journal and ends up reading the journal. She began to realize that the cats seemed to be determined to distract her from finishing the journal.

Fort Meow has a total of 18 chapters and it took me 2hrs 20mins to finish the game with an 81% completion rate in steam. Considering the short time frame, I thought they had a rather well thought out storyline that shows a structured beginning, middle and end. I was intrigued by the content in the journal, i don’t want to spoil anything but the cats are evil here.

Gameplay:

The gameplay is rather simple, our main job is to stake up the furniture around Nia in order to keep the cats from disturbing her while she reads the journal. From the image above, it shows the different furniture available for choosing along with three two main options. Explore button is used to explore the house and collect more furniture once the battery in the top corner reaches 100%. Each furniture has special stats to help us defend Nia from the numerous types of cats. Defend button is to start the game itself and see if our stacking skills were enough to fend  off the cats

Overall I liked the simple mechanic Fort Meow provides. It’s extremely easy to pick up and does require a certain level of brain cells to complete each stage. I find the middle stage (Chapter 9-12) to be the hardest. That’s the point where different types of cats start showing up. It gives your brain a nice workout while being entertaining at the same time.

Sound:

I’m afraid it left no impression on me what so ever. I mean I played two and a half hours but I can’t remember how it sounds like at all. Overall, I’m going to assume that it was just average.

Graphics:

This is a small indie game that you play to pass the time on a boring weekend so the graphics are obviously not its main selling point. Taken that into account I’m quite impressed with the animation quality. The cat’s animation is very smooth and they have a nice colouring scheme for the furniture. Character design could’ve been better but considering the nature of the game (Indie and puzzle based), it’s decent enough. I won’t be too critical here and give the game some leeway.

Replayability:

Hm… This is always a hard one for me. I can imagine myself playing this game in a year or two years time but it’s only because I haven’t got any better games to play. Realistically speaking, the game is too short to have any replayability values inside. While it was a great way to spend two hours, I can’t imagine myself spending any more time than needed.