DAMMIT! Why did I pick up the color brush today, instead of just sketching that new daymare game – as usual… Not that I’m on the fence about this one right now, not at all. DMT4 is coming up with the usual color pattern (meaning – pattern almost non existent), but…. this looks fine…
Oh well, I guess this is the POSSIBLE way the Daymare franchise might evolve in time. Move over Steam games, I’m coming.
10-year Anniversary Special Edition timestamp
reviews: Jay is Games | Imperium Gier | Nerds Raging | Indie Statik | Ecrans | Appelogen | Flash Mush
more reviews: Manitoba Music | TROAM | Gameological Society | StarBlog | Concept Hunter | Polityka
let’s plays: Sir Tap Tap | Indie Impressions
interview with Cat & me | Cat in Color
Daymare Cat is a gorgeously sketched exploratory platformer that feels like a simple adventure game. That feeling might be because Mateusz Skutnik has a rich history of point-and-clickers. The platforming here isn’t particularly challenging, but almost every hand-drawn scene is worth witnessing. The final reward in Daymare Cat is also something you can take with you anywhere. Thanks for that, Cat Jahnke!
[description by IndieGames]
Let’s grab our friends and go to very distant lands with today’s game: Daymare Cat by developer Mateusz Skutnik. Primarily an adventure game, Daymare Cat also has some very minor puzzles and simple platforming sequences, but the real draw here is the amazing art and music (music by Cat Jahnke) – almost like Alice in Wonderland we’ll explore a surreal, alien world with a lot of strange things going on in it while we search for records to open up a mysterious door. Try Daymare Cat for free at the link below and try the other work from this developer at the official site.
O twórczości Mateusza Skutnika pisałam już w niedalekiej przeszłości, omawiając serie, nad którymi autor pracuje. Doczekaliśmy się nowej odsłony z uniwersum Daymare Town – przedstawiam Daymare Cat.
Daymare Cat jest przygodową grą platformową, która wymaga od nas zbierania płyt winylowych. Wcielamy się w niej w młodą, roztrzepaną (chociaż kto w Daymare Town jest uczesany…) dziewczynę, która wyjątkowo raźnie i ochoczo skacze z cegłówek na parapety, z parapetów na unoszące w powietrzu platformy, eksploruje ciemne pomieszczenia i nory. Wszystkie zebrane przez nas przedmioty – zwyczajem innych gier przygodowych autorstwa Skutnika – pojawiają się w ekwipunku, czekając tylko na nasze ich użycie w odpowiedniej chwili.
Tych, którzy zaznajomieni są z wcześniejszymi tytułami Daymare Town poinformować muszę, że Daymare Cat nie jest typową grą z tej serii. Po pierwsze nie jest klasyczną grą przygodową typu point and click, po drugie jest nieco łatwiejsza, a po trzecie szelesty i powiew wiatru oraz chrupotanie nóżek maleńkich stworzeń gdzieś pod podłogą i w ścianach zastąpiła tu po części muzyka Cat Jahnke. Daymare Cat zachował jednak styl graficzny innych gier Skutnika – gra obfituje w najmniejsze szczegóły, a świat ponownie budują najmniejsze linie i punkciki, nadając mu wrażenie niebywałej kruchości.
Każdy może zagrać w Daymare Cat zupełnie za darmo. Miłej zabawy.
autor: Guga
Het spelletje Daymare Cat is al weer een pareltje van de hand van Mateusz Skutnik in de hem kenmerkende geschetste tekenstijl.
Aan jou om de heldin Cat doorheen de wonderlijke straatjes van het stadje Daymare te loodsen op zoek naar vijf platen die uiteindelijk zullen zorgen voor de muzikale verlossing.
Alhoewel Daymare Cat een platform game is, is Mateusz er op meesterlijke wijze in geslaagd de nadruk te leggen op het oplossen van de puzzels en het verkennen van de locaties. En dat verkennen wordt puur genieten gelet op de zorg waarmee ieder scherm werd getekend.
Avec la course aux meilleurs graphismes que se livrent les jeux next-gen, on en oublierait presque le pouvoir de la simplicité. Mateusz Skutnik et ses univers sont là pour nous le rappeler. Après nous avoir enchanté avec ses Gnomes, rendu fous avec ses Submarines et en règle générale fait passer de très bons moments avec tous ses jeux Pastel Games, c’est la série des Daymare Town qui est de retour.
Composé de trois épisodes principaux (le quatrième est à 40% terminé) et de trois spin-off épisodes secondaires, ces jeux d’aventure/plateforme/puzzle sont une expérience graphique à part entière. Univers en noir et blanc entre Tim Burton et Shel Silverstein, le décor fourmille de détails tant le dessin est précis et sans fioriture.
Ce dernier opus, Daymare Cat, nous place dans une ville cauchemardesque, distordue et vide. L’atmosphère est pesante, la sortie inconnue. La seule chose qui nous accompagne est le vent. Mais ici et là, bien cachés, reposent cinq disques que l’on devra placer sur des phonographes, chacun laissant entendre sa propre mélodie. Le jeu est court mais la difficulté est bien dosée. Enchanteur par ses graphismes et son ambiance, poétique et sombre à la fois, Daymare Cat est un vrai chef d’œuvre.
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Close your eyes (but read the following words first). Now, imagine a place that you could go to in order to unwind, where colors leave you to admire just the outline of things, and a forlorn wind blows in the background. Everything has a great detail, and you can’t help but stare at the beauty in the tiniest of details. Cloths blow in the breeze, dirt tunnels are caressed by roots and the sky seems limitless.
Does it look anything like Daymare Cat?
Mateusz Skutnik has clearly spent a lot of effort sketching out each and every screen in this puzzle-platformer, and the eloquent result is a daydream across a colorless and mostly silent world, across which you must travel to find freedom and solve the mystery that seems to lock you inside. The place appears to be a small, abandoned town, but there’s life in every nook and cranny due to the love that’s been etched into them by the creator. The world that is presented to you really feels as if you could lift up a stone and find every bit of dirt hiding underneath; it’s that detailed.
You won’t be spending too much of your time admiring the scenery, though, not after the initial few minutes of playing Daymare Cat. There are puzzles to be solved, most of which are pretty easy, much like the platformer sections. But what will hold you up in a few moments are the background passages and doors that aren’t made obvious, and so you’ll probably run past them a number of times, searching for what you’re missing without realizing the 2D plane and sketches are letting you down just a little.
I guess that’s a result of making a scene that looks so natural, despite its humble fantasy; nothing sticks out in particular. That’s only a minor problem that will only plague you in those moments, but won’t spoil the game come its end. You should remember it fondly.
Daymare Cat does feel more like an adventure game than anything else as a result of its progression through exploration, rather than challenging exploration or platforming. You mostly stick around the same areas and will backtrack when coming to a dead end quite often, and this is when you’ll start noticing that some of the backgrounds hold passages that you didn’t notice beforehand. Keys are one thing you collect for a while, but the main goal is to open a big door that requires you to find five records and play them on one of the gramophones around the place.
Once you’ve managed to do this, the game will come to a finish, and you’ll be given a link to download the song that you put together with the records for free. Wonderful! That art style and a free song? You’d be a fool to not play this one.
I have never reviewed nor spotlighted a flash game from Pastel Stories although he makes some great flash titles that you all should be familiar with such as the Submachine and Daymare Town series. Well after the release of Daymare Cat I loved it so much I felt I should feature it over here finally on FlashMush.
If you have never played his other series, Submachine is essentially a point and click adventure game. I mention this as Daymare Cat has similar aspects but in a platforming medium instead. What I mean by this is the goal in Daymare Cat is to essentially find all the records to play on turntables to open a door and to do so you need to find items scattered throughout the crazy world and place them in the right spots. Now don’t let the platforming aspect of Daymare Cat scare you off as it is nothing challenging just the medium chosen for gameplay to help move everything along.
Now where Daymare Cat really shines is in the music (by Cat Jahnke) and the graphical design. Since Daymare Cat is kind of music based (with the records and such) music plays a great role in Daymare Cat and find it really sets this surreal ambiance that is amazing. Combine this with the crazy artistic hard to explain style of graphics you get one of the best looking flash games I’ve played in a while. Overall, Daymare Cat is a pleasure to look at and play.
FlashMush Reviews Rating: 8.5/10
Now, normally I would wait until Friday to post about a new free game, but we have some exclusive content here, and it is an installment in one of my favourite online franchises, so we’re making it a special Free Game Wednesday. And make sure to keep reading after the review for an exclusive Q&A with the creators.
About a month ago, I reviewed “Daymare Town”, a trilogy of online games by designer and artist Mateusz Skutnik. With breathtaking artwork, intriguing puzzles, and an atmosphere that can’t be beat, “Daymare Town” has become legendary in the annals of browser games.
Among the fans of the game is Cat, of the new music group “Cat and the Menagerie”. She was such a fan, in fact, that she decided to message Mateusz on Twitter. The two of them started talking, and before long, they had an agreement. Mateusz would create a new “Daymare Town” game, and Cat and her group would write the music for it.
The result is “Daymare Cat”, a game that certainly matches “Daymare Town” in terms of general goal (escape the town) and art style, but also features original music and a new game style. The original “Daymare Town” trilogy was a fairly straightforward point-and-click adventure game in static first person format. “Daymare Cat”, however is a sidescrolling platformer in third person (with the main character being modeled after Cat herself). Rather than the logic puzzles of the original trilogy, “Cat” also features strictly jumping and physics puzzles.
This could feel like a disservice to the original trilogy, but it actually doesn’t. The unique and striking artwork is still there, as is the desolate, howling atmosphere. The animation on Cat is well done, especially considering “Daymare Town” featured little in the way of animation, and it’s nice to see Mateusz stretch his legs a little. The controls are also thankfully simple; left and right to move, up to jump, down to use objects or go through doorways, all of which is made clear in the intro. The one big complaint that I have is that, while the jumping mechanic is forgiving in that you only need the barest inch on the platform to stay on it, it’s also highly sensitive. Jumping sends you careening upwards, and you can change direction in midair. Also, God help you if your browser is lagging, because that throws the physics engine completely out of whack. It takes some getting used to.
Once you do get used to it, however, the game flows nicely, and Mateusz’s artwork shines. The really striking aspect, however, comes with the way they incorporate Cat and the Menagerie’s music. The object is to collect five records and play them on five separate players. Each record plays an individual and interesting piece of music. When all of the records are collected, however, you realize the the five individual tracks come together to form one cohesive song, Cat and the Menagerie’s “Better”.
It’s a remarkably unique and striking aspect of the gameplay. I’m also pleased to note that, once you complete the game, you will be given a link to download the song (free) for yourself. I’m not a music critic, but I took that chance to download in a heartbeat. Cat has a near-ethereal voice, and the song itself is a mix of tribal beats and electronica that I found matched the game’s atmosphere beautifully, lending a new layer to an already remarkable franchise.
You’ll be through this game in about fifteen minutes, but it’s worth the playthrough. It’s a delightful addition to the “Daymare Town” series, and a fine piece of collaboration by two excellent artists.
4/5