Halloween is the perfect time to settle down with a spooky new game. Promising a creepy mystery with heartfelt moments, Ghostly Whiskers has the markings of an excellent game. Is this the Halloween treat of the year? Or is this cat-themed adventure disguising a terrible trick?
One Terrible Night
Ghostly Whiskers puts you in the furry paws of a house cat as you awake in your bed to find your owner is missing. Searching the house, you find clues hinting towards something terrible happening. You then break out of your home and take it upon yourself to save your owner.
The set-up is sadly lacking and only goes downhill from there. What follows is a pretty abysmal collection of puzzle-platforming levels you can run through in an hour to reach a lacklustre conclusion.
Impurrfect Platforming
Each area has a few puzzles and some platforming to overcome. Their difficulty suggests a younger target audience but lacks any real hand-holding. Similarly, the game can be played solo and co-op, yet you can solve every puzzle alone, which makes the co-op somewhat obsolete.
There’s an attempt at mixing up the gameplay by introducing obstacles like spiders and cranes. You can even crawl and scratch things, which rarely came into play. However, it all leads to a final boss battle that you win with a single disappointing switch.
People looking for collectables will find “Cat Coins” scattered around the levels to buy accessories you have to dig up. Some of the platforming required to get these was not worth the effort. Once I realised these coins were only for cosmetics (and I was playing on Switch with no achievements), I ignored them.
The Controls
I was playing on the Nintendo Switch, which was all the more disappointing because the game would not recognise my controller, only the Joy-Cons. This wasn’t great for me because they hurt my hands.
The controls aren’t intuitive either and weren’t very responsive. The cat movements were sluggish, except for the jump button, which lets you gain air like you’re hitting a ramp in Pro-Skater 2. Honestly, it’s worse than some GameCube-era platformers, and it made the game really hard to enjoy. I want to believe industry standards are higher these days, especially for games aimed at children.
The Horror
Ghostly Whiskers has some great atmospherics that are whimsical yet spooky. Even with heavy reliance on bought assets, it doesn’t come together well enough to offset some of the gameplay issues. There’s also one track with a disconcerting sound clip saying “it’s tickle time,” followed by something unintelligible that will haunt me till Christmas.
I ran into a few glitches in the short time that I spent with Ghostly Whiskers. The quest tracker couldn’t keep up and left some goals unchecked, which didn’t affect progression but did cause some confusion. I also tried jumping on a few things and got stuck a few times or triggered a sliding animation when there shouldn’t have been one.
More Horror
I picked Ghostly Whiskers up on Keymailer and was surprised to find a suspicious-looking thumbnail when I downloaded my game. Some searching suggests the company has used Generative AI in their promotional materials, among other things, which may explain a few things…
The Vibes
I went into Ghostly Whiskers with zero expectations and was still left disappointed. It plays like something from thirty years ago, while proudly displaying the markers of shovelware asset flips that have no place in the market outside a 2007 flash website. Only after playing did I recognise the inspiration and come to realise that I was playing another cheap wannabe clone.
Platforms: PS4/5, Nintendo Switch
Publishers: NOSTRA.GAMES
Developers: NOSTRA.GAMES
Played On: Switch
Key Provided By: Keymailer
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