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.