Stars In The Trash is a platformer where the level was built for somebody else

Moka is a house cat who has had enough of being indoors, so he leaves. What follows is a narrative platformer with exploration, puzzles and fights, drawn by hand in watercolour and pitched openly at the animated films it grew up on. You explore, you make friends, you fight when you have to, and you stay ahead of the kennelman, who is out working the same streets you are.

The interesting constraint is the one the premise hands the designers for free. Nothing in a city is placed for a cat. Ledges, gutters, gaps under doors, the tops of walls and the space behind furniture are all just architecture, built for people who never thought about you, and the game has to turn that leftover geometry into a route. That is a very different job from a platformer that lays out floating platforms at a comfortable jump distance, because the shapes came first and the traversal has to be found inside them.

It also decides what the verbs can be. A cat has no inventory and cannot open a door, negotiate, or read a sign. What it has is height, quiet, small size and claws, so the moveset lands on climbing, squeezing, dropping, pouncing and getting out of the way — and every puzzle has to be solvable with that short list. The store page calls the challenges intuitive and manageable, which is the right ambition here: the pleasure is meant to be in reading a human room as a cat, not in fighting the controls.

The kennelman is the other half of it. He is not a health bar with a pattern; he is a person with a job, and the design consequence is that a stretch of street stops being terrain and becomes a place you can be caught. And it is short on purpose — two to three hours, roughly the length of the films it is imitating.

How to make a good platforming character argues that a character worth controlling comes out of movement tuning and animation with personality, not out of the ability list. A cat is the hardest version of that test and the most rewarding one to pass, because everybody in the audience already knows exactly how a cat lands, hesitates at an edge, and changes its mind halfway through a jump. Hand-drawn animation is the only place that knowledge can be answered, and it is why the watercolour is a mechanic rather than a coat of paint.

How level design can tell a story is the one that carries the narrative weight. Moka cannot be told anything. Nobody in a human city explains itself to a cat, so what the world means has to arrive through rooms, routes, props and light — the state of a kitchen, what is left in an alley, which doors are shut. A game about an animal in a human city is forced into environmental storytelling whether it wants to be or not, and this one seems to want to be.

Ico, and design by subtraction is the model for the shape of the whole thing. Ico survives because everything that did not serve the bond between two characters was cut out of it. Stars In The Trash is making the same bet in miniature: the pitch is a friendship and the fear of losing it, the runtime is two to three hours, and the fights exist to put that friendship at risk rather than to build a combat system. That is a small target, and it is a much better one than a longer game with more systems and less to lose.

Stars In The Trash is by [Valhalla Cats](https://valhallacats.com/), published by Valhalla Cats with IndieArk, out now on Windows since December 2024, filed under Adventure and Indie. It is single-player, with full controller support, achievements, Steam Cloud saves and trading cards.

The honest summary is that this is a short, made-by-hand adventure that is unusually clear about who it is for. The developers put the question on their own store page — do you want to be a cat, do you like animated classics, do you like short games — and a team willing to name its audience that plainly is usually a team that knows what it built.

If the appeal is being an animal in a place built for people, Hubert is the closest sibling on this list: you play the sheepdog rather than the farmer, and the farm only makes sense once you are down at the dog’s height reading it by nose. Same trick, different animal — the world stays exactly as it was, and lowering the camera is what turns it into a game.