Hustle Cat & The Dating Sim Experience (A Review)
Boy did I love Hustle Cat. I’m not even going to dance around it. It’s a joy all around. I’ll get to the good stuff, but here’s a summary if you’re not familiar with this beast.
Hustle Cat is the story of our player character, Avery Grey, looking for a job and finding one at a nearby cat café. Avery eagerly signs on, but quickly learns that the café is more than it seems. Not only is it a beacon for magical activity, it’s got a curse on it that turns its employees into cats when they leave the shop!
Hustle Cat stands out firstly by way of its set-up mechanics: Your character model is lightly customizable in that you can suggest gender presentation by way of hair length, choose from she/he/they pronouns, and chose from a small range of skin colors. This model remains consistent throughout play, even in the CGs.
Gameplay is a delight. It doesn’t diverge from the click-to-proceed-with-dialogue standard and there aren’t a metric ton of choices to make, but there are enough. Some choices take you off and back on the destined path, and some point you towards different endings. The writing is fantastic, especially for Avery, who has a natural, personable sense of self and a kind but cheeky sense of humor. Some of their lines had me laughing out loud, but more important then that, I felt like they were just an all-around brilliantly-written player character. Their reactions generally made sense, felt like natural reactions to have to everything from being flirted with, to finding out you’re transforming into a cat, to defending your turf against a wicked, wicked witch.
It’s a risk as a developer — when the goal is to find the most efficient way to let the player stand in for the player character — to have them possess a voice and a personality. But I really preferred this method to the silent-protagonists of RPGing (Chrono Trigger) or the “most generic/projectable model we could think of” approach (any eroge.) When the written personality is natural and reacts to their environment reasonably and appropriately, you feel like you’re in it perhaps even more successfully than with a “blank-slate” style character. The last stateside-build dating sim I’ve played was Coming Out on Top, which I enjoyed, but the player character was sometimes unlikable and posed choices none of which seemed appropriate to me. I neither got to feel like the player character was me nor a character I actually liked very much. Hustle Cat’s Avery is just so smoothly written that it landed perfectly for me.
I was determined to play through all 6 routes (I found two bad endings too!) before reviewing, and I’m glad I did. Even before playing Undertale, I never had the desire to complete all the possible routes of the game just because I could. Generally I found a character I clicked with, and no matter how many times I replayed the game, it would feel like a betrayal to romance another character (I’ve played Story of Seasons four times and I’ve married Raeger every dang time!) But let me tell you, Undertale made that sentiment worse, a big theme of the game being that characters in the game are aware that you’re completing the “evil” route just because you can. They know you were once their friends. Legitimately chilling. But I soldiered on, intending to Hustle every single Cat. For science.
Hustle Cat does a very good job of giving you satisfyingly different paths and endings as a reward for each romp. And I didn’t feel like playing through six times was a hassle: the fast forward button and the autosave feature are blessings. Nothing worse that trudging through a completionist quest to find that you need to wear out your clicking finger AND restart after landing on a bad end! And I was genuinely endeared and surprised each time I played.
I stumbled upon romancing Hayes in my first play through, and decided he was well my favorite. But then I played for Landry, and was delighted to see how personal his route was. There was a unique new character and conflict, which I didn’t expect. The ending round about lands in the same place when it comes to the overarching conflict, but you resolve it with a different person at your side, and their individual strengths, each time. I didn’t expect my favorite person to be Reese (though, considering my tastes, maybe I should have,) but BOY was he ever my favorite. Sometimes he has the best dialogue even in other people’s routes.
The game is worth playing through in its absolute entirety. After my first run, I was feeling a little let down that I didn’t get to actually learn about the universe’s magic and rules… when Avery got an explanation, it was given a sort of blah blah fade-to-black sort of dismissal. But I learned a little more each time I played. The world of witches gets bigger each time, and you meet new ones unique to certain paths. The “secret” route (the one you unlock after romancing all five staff members) is very satisfying. Nearly fifty percent of the game is completely unique to this route, and blessedly gives you the most insight into the magic in the Hustle Cat world. Feels like a genuine reward for all of your efforts.
The only thing that truly pains me is that on each route you help your one partner solve their problems, so when playing other routes, I thought “Oh no! Poor X! Who will help them sort out their heart-wrenching personal problems??” And I’m glad. I’ve really come to appreciate games that make me love the characters so much that I worry about neglecting them on the account of game mechanics. I think that’s a writing triumph. They transcend pixels and become ideas I really, genuinely care about.
And I can’t stress more how absolutely delightful the writing is. It had me laughing and grinning the entire time. Got me tearing up more than once. Each route gives you something different to help your partner conquer: fear, anger, self-worth, family, legacy and inadequacy, and resignation.
I have a couple of complaints, but they’re minor, and really just picking on it because it’s otherwise so good. I was a little bummed that all the characters were skinny. Some body diversity goes a long way to make a world feel real, and makes bigger people like me feel like I can be accepted as attractive/desireable too. There was also a bit of a difference in the character models and level of rendering in the CGs than the rest of the art (I’ve been assured that the they’re done by the same artist, although I wasn’t the only one wondering if the CGs were drawn by someone else entirely,) and that change in style was somewhat jarring. Since CGs are really like the “rewards” of the dating sim experience, it was a bit of a let down to feel that they weren’t as carefully rendered as the rest of the character art. But again, a minor complaint. The art was generally very good and I appreciated the immersive, moody backgrounds and especially the stand-out, precious-as-heck cat models by Audra Furuichi.
I can’t stress enough what an overall triumph this game is. If you don’t believe me, please consider the internal dialogue:
Hustle Cat, produced by Date Nighto, can be purchased on itch right now and will be on Steam soon. The creation team is Kasey Van Hise (lead writer), Lindsay Woods (lead artist), Samm Neiland, Audra Furuichi, Jenn Doyle, Conrad Kreyling, & Jo Fu.
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I’m Kori Michele, cartoonist, artist and co-author for DOVETAIL, and co-editor of the stunning Other Side Anthology of Queer Paranormal Romance. I moonlight as a queer game obsessee and I’m perpetually covered in glitter and flannel.
