Gameplay
The game is a puzzle-based adventure game. The game is entirely played using only the four arrow keys, with the ESC key being used to access the Save/Load menu. Because of this highly simplified control scheme, characters can only move left and right between scenes while up and down are used to interact with objects in the environment and the player's inventory, respectively. All character dialogue is fully voiced and the cut-scenes cannot be skipped. The player can occasionally make dialogue decisions that alter the story slightly, and some story scenes are told out of order.
The ending changes slightly depending on the player's dialogue choices. The game deals with mature themes such as depression, suicide, murder and cancer, but also provides moments of humor.
Plot
The protagonist is Susan Ashworth, a chronically depressed, middle-aged woman with no friends. She hates flowers, and her only companions are stray cats, whom she summons to her flat by playing her piano. She is known in her neighborhood as the cat lady.
One night, Susan decides to take her own life, but this leads her to a strange place in death where she encounters the Queen of Maggots, who grants her immortality and gives her the task of ridding the world of five psychopaths referred to as the "parasites".
Susan returns to the world of the living and wakes up in a hospital bed. She meets Liz, a friendly nurse unhappy with her job, who tells Susan her "daughter" saved her; much to the chagrin of Susan, who has no daughter. Susan attempts to escape, only to be stopped by Doctor X - the hospitals' psychiatrist. She tells him how Liz killed herself the night before, after which Doctor X traps and kills Susan. She awakes later in some kind of hidden torture basement to the screams of another victim. She discovers that Doctor X kills his patients to reform them as artwork. Susan escapes, possibly after killing Doctor X.
She returns to her house, attempting to return to her normal life. Whilst summoning the cats, she receives a complaint from a neighbour who threatens to call pest control. After this, she meets Mitzi, a young, homeless woman willing to be her new roommate. She had lied about being Susan's daughter to save her life. When Susan sees the Queen of Maggots behind Mitzi, she realises she is close to death, leading Mitzi to reveal she has cancer. Susan learns that Mitzi had a boyfriend named Jack who was driven to insanity upon learning of her cancer. He stumbled upon a suicide forum online, in which a troll called the "Eye of Adam" lured people to kill themselves. Jack has attempted to persuade her into it, though Mitzi had refused, leaving Jack to kill himself. Mitzi insists that she just wants to find the person, who is in the flat, to "talk" with them before she dies. Soon after, Susan investigates outside after hearing the cats howling outside, only to be kidnapped by the pest controller.
Susan awakes in the pest controllers' house, tied to a table. The man reveals he is sexually attracted to Susan, though his wife then interrupts and pours bleach over Susan's face. The pest controller, seeing Susan so bloodied, loses interest and abandons her with a gun, unaware of Susan's immortality. Susan finds the house littered with cat and human meat. She unsuccessfully calls the police and then Mitzi, asking for the chemical combination used by Jack, and uses this to murder the couple.
Upon returning to the flat, Susan and Mitzi slowly become friends, and Susan helps Mitzi find the Eye of Adam. When having coffee, Mitzi asks Susan if she has children, unknowingly opening her old wounds, before Susan angrily walks out, only to be murdered by a man pretending to offer flowers. Susan awakes on some kind of dock, in a limbo state between life and death, where she has to blow out another candle to reveal another death.
Awaking in the flat, she is tied to Mitzi in the bath, where they fail to escape. Susan reveals her hatred for flowers; ten years ago, she was young mother to Zoe, married to a taxi driver named Eric. One night, whilst Eric is working, Susan is at home with Zoe . She tries to break things off with a man who attempts to pursue her despite her being married by repeatedly sending her flowers, which she hides in Zoe's room. Eric returns home, informing Susan of a terrorist attack happening earlier that day, nearly killing him. Susan was oblivious to this as she was talking to her admirer, who promptly calls to interrupt the conversation. Whilst Eric and Susan argue, Zoe has an allergic reaction to the pollen from the flowers, eventually killing her. Susan also reveals to Mitzi that Eric was found dead shortly after, leaving her alone and depressed.
The ending of the game changes slightly based on the player's choices.
Cast
The game has English-only voice acting.
- Lynsey Frost as Susan Ashworth – a middle aged widowed cat lady who suffers from depression following the deaths of her infant daughter and husband but slowly comes around to dealing with her past over the course of the game. Frost would reprise her role for appearances in both the remaster of Downfall and as a cameo in the game’s sequel, Lorelai.
- Brittany Morgan Williams as Mitzi Hunt – an energetic, tech-savvy, and terminally ill young woman who moves in with Susan in her quest for revenge against the online troll responsible for taking her boyfriend's life.
- Klemens Koehring as Doctor X / Eric Ashworth – Doctor X is the resident hospital psychiatrist who is also a serial killer targeting women to be reformed as his "artwork". Eric Ashworth is Susan's late husband who died from alcohol poisoning shortly after their daughter's death.
- David Firth as Pest Controller / His Wife – a cannibal couple who regularly kidnap women and eat their bodies.
- Jesse Gunn as Joe Davis, Susan's schizophrenic neighbor who tortures his wife in secret and acts as protagonist of the developer’s previous game, Downfall.
- Pete Bucknall as Bryan, Susan's hostile and unsympathetic neighbor.
- Margaret Cowen as Queen of Maggots – the personification of death Susan sees after her attempt at suicide, representing Susan's self-loathing but also a chance at recovery. The Queen acts as the series’ main antagonist, with Cowen voicing all appearances.
- Alex Sinclair as Doctor
- Dave Seaman as Jesse
- Marianne Miller as Nurse
- Mark Lovegrove as Police Phone Operator
- Remigiusz Michalski as Crow / Ivy Davis
Reception
The Cat Lady received generally favorable reviews. It received an aggregated score of 81/100 based on 11 reviews on Metacritic.[4] Kevin VanOrd of GameSpot gave the game a very positive review, and concluded it by saying, "If you seek horror, The Cat Lady may sometimes freak you out, though probably not outright scare you. But that horror is in service of a touching character portrait—a portrait that's authentically, poignantly askew."[1] The game won "Best Story" in the 2012 Aggie Awards.[6]
