Black Cat: Kitty Puzzle Game

A black cat crossing your path brings bad luck. Here you draw the path yourself. Every garden is already built when you arrive. The stones are laid, the cats are sitting on them, and above each cat is a small thought bubble showing what she is after: a bowl of milk, a warm nap, a ball of yarn. You pick one cat, draw her route across the stones with your finger, then do the same for the next. When every cat has a way, you let them all go at once and find out whether you thought it through. WHY IT IS HARDER THAN IT LOOKS Cats do not take turns. They all set off on the same beat and move one stone at a time, so the puzzle is never one path. It is every path at once. If two cats end up on the same stone at the same moment and want different things, they fight, and the garden is lost. If they happen to want the same thing, they pass each other without any trouble. So the question is never simply how to get her there. It is how to get her there while the others are crossing the same garden on the same beat. That is why two routes that each work perfectly can still fail together. A path that looks clear when you draw it can put a cat on a stone at exactly the wrong moment three seconds later. You learn to read the garden as a whole rather than one cat at a time, and the moment that clicks is the moment the game starts. FIFTY GARDENS, IN ORDER The first gardens have two cats and a short walk, and they teach the rule without saying much. Then the stones get sparser and the cats get more numerous. Later gardens put three cats in a field where every route worth taking runs through the same few stones, and you spend far longer looking than drawing. There is no filler in the middle. Every garden was built to be a different problem from the one before it, and the difficulty was measured rather than guessed: each one had to be provably harder to reason about than the last before it was allowed into the game. Every garden has a worked solution, checked by hand and by machine. Each one can be solved. None of them can be solved by drawing the obvious line. STARS Solving a garden is one thing. Solving it in as few stones as the answer uses is another. Three stars go to a route as tight as the intended one, two to a workable route that wanders, one to a route that got there in the end. The star count sits under each garden in the picker, so you always know which ones you have left something on. A PAID APP, AND THAT IS ALL No advertising, anywhere, ever. Nothing to buy once you have bought the game. No account, no sign-in, no email address, no notifications begging you to come back. The game asks for none of your data because it sends none. It runs with the phone in airplane mode, on a train, in a tunnel, in a waiting room, on a plane with no wifi. WHAT IS IN IT Fifty gardens with hand-checked solutions Two and three cats per garden, each with her own coloured route Three stars per garden for solving it as tightly as the answer does Undo a single step, or clear a route and draw it again Sound and music you can switch off independently Seven languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and Russian Built for iPhone, in portrait, playable with one hand FOR CHILDREN AND FOR GROWN-UPS Nothing here is timed and nothing punishes you for being slow. You can sit and look at a garden for as long as you like, restart it as often as you like, and lose nothing by trying something that turns out to be wrong. The early gardens are gentle enough for a child who has worked out that the cat wants the milk and that she cannot walk through a gap. The late ones are not gentle at all, and adults get properly stuck on them. MADE BY A SMALL STUDIO Black Cat was built by a small independent studio and finished without a single dark pattern in it. If a garden ever seems impossible, it is not. There is a worked solution for every one of the fifty on our website.