Cat Life Simulator makes being a nuisance the main verb

You pick one of three cats, put a collar or a bow or a silly hat on it, and walk out into a city that was not built for you. There is no dungeon and no boss. What there is instead is the list of things a cat actually does — scratch the furniture, nap wherever you happen to land, purr, and knock objects off the surfaces they were sitting on — and a world where every one of those actions lands on something that belongs to somebody.

That last part is the design. In most open worlds the environment is scenery you move through; here it is the thing you act on. Houses can be entered, rooftops can be climbed, alleys connect places the street does not, and every home has an owner who did not agree to any of this. Getting thrown out is a normal outcome rather than a fail state, which quietly turns exploration into trespass instead of tourism.

People are treated as interactive surfaces too. You can beg at someone, charm them, or simply plant yourself in their way — three different kinds of pressure applied to the same person, with the cat’s only leverage being that it is small, cute and impossible to argue with. Other animals carry missions of their own, sometimes as partners and sometimes as rivals, so the city gets a second social layer that has nothing to do with humans at all.

There is a collectible layer of hidden items scattered around the map, which is the ordinary part of this and the part that matters least. The real promise is the domestic one: that a living room is a completely different space when you are eleven inches tall, nobody can stop you, and none of the rules of the house were written with you in mind.

The Rise of the Systemic Game argues that the power in systemic design comes from objects, characters and rules being able to act on each other, producing plans and accidents nobody wrote down. A cat sim is close to the ideal test case for that, because a cat is a small agent whose entire appeal is causing outcomes that were not planned. If the vase, the shelf, the owner and the front door are all real systems, the game writes its own anecdotes. If they are scripted set pieces, knocking the vase over is a two-second animation you will have seen forty times by the second hour.

The Genius AI Behind The Sims is the other half of it, and its lesson is restraint: needs, scored options, tuned curves, and a deliberate refusal to simulate everything. The households of The Sims read as alive because the people in them wanted things and chose between them. A street cat wandering into a stranger’s kitchen is only interesting if the stranger is running something like that underneath — if they were busy with something before you arrived, and interrupting it costs them.

The Secret of Mario’s Jump (and other Versatile Verbs) is the standard the moment-to-moment has to meet. A verb is great not because it is one button but because context keeps changing what it means. A cat’s vocabulary is deliberately short — jump, climb, scratch, knock, beg, nap — so the whole game rests on those meaning something different on a kitchen counter than they do on a rooftop, in an alley, or in front of a dog that is bigger than you. Get that right and three cats and a hat shop is plenty of content. Get it wrong and it is a walking simulator with claws.

Cat Life Simulator is made and self-published by Life Game Developers. It is listed as coming soon on Windows, single-player, with partial controller support, filed under Action, Indie and Simulation. There is no date on the store page, so treat it as something to keep an eye on rather than a plan for the weekend.

The genre tags read more like a statement of intent than a category. Simulation is the ambition, Action is presumably the chases and the escapes, and Indie means a small team is trying to make an entire city react convincingly to an animal that has no dialogue and no inventory — a much harder engineering problem than a trailer full of knocked-over mugs makes it look.

If the appeal is being an animal loose in a human world, Hubert is the closest thing on this list. It puts you in the farm dog instead of the farmer, and the farm only starts making sense once you are reading it from the wrong height. Cat Life Simulator is running the same trick in a city, with the loyalty turned down and the property damage turned up.