The Nerdy Type

Do you have a genre of games that you love but you’re particularly bad at? For me, that genre is puzzle games. I pride myself on my ability to think logically, but if you put a puzzle game in front of me, that logic skill seems to evaporate from my mind until I’m left frustrated. 

However, I know my strengths, and when it comes to puzzle games, that strength is pipe-connecting games. I don’t know if there’s an ‘official’ name for this type of game, but I do know that Toffee Cats is a particularly cute example of the type of game I mean. 

Toffee Cats is an indie game developed by Traint. It’s impossibly cute, strangely hynotic, and further proof of my skills at this strange little niche of the puzzle genre. 

Cats and their butts

In case you don’t know what type of games I’m talking about, let me try to explain. You have a finite grid, and the start and end points for a collection of pipes. You need to connect those start and end points within the grid, without overlapping any of the different pipes, and fill out the entire grid in the process. I’ve mostly seen these games on mobile. 

Toffee Cats follows this exact premise, except that rather than the start and end points of a pipe, you have cats that are split in two. You need to connect the impossibly adorable head of a cat to its equally adorable butt, thus gradually filling out the grid with what ends up being a variety of differently colored sausage cats. 

And, when you successfully connect a cat to its butt, it will meow or purr, which definitely adds to the feeling of satisfaction.  

Hundreds of levels

Toffee Cats is split into different sections of levels, ranging from beginner to impossible. Beginner levels are based on a 5×5 grid with four or five cats to connect, increasing incrementally until you have an 11×11 grid in the impossible levels and more cats to turn into sausages than I’m honestly willing to count. 

Ironically, with these bigger grids, it’s harder to finish a level when there are fewer cats because you need to go rogue and fill out the grid in whatever way you can using your limited kitty sausages. Having a fully packed grid allows for some planning, and you can narrow down what needs to go where by a process of elimination, starting with the easiest to connect cat bits. 

I opened up Toffee Cats to try it out with the specific intention of writing this, and I ended up playing for two hours until my fiancé reminded me that I am, in fact, under a time crunch to get things written. Now I’m trying to avoid opening it back up again, because I have actual work to do. 

If you want to get Toffee Cats, it’s fully released and available to purchase for a criminally low price via Steam. If I can’t play, then you might as well.