Cat Girl Without Salad Review

Well slather me in honey and throw me to the lesbians. This is a game that should not exist, but here it is. It’s a game that’s all games, but yes isn’t. It’s ridiculous to the point of parody, but very serious.

This, brothers and sisters, is Cat Girl Without Salad.

Cat Girl and her trusty space squid assistant are bounty hunters. They’re job? Hunt bounties. I assumed that didn’t need explained, but here we are.

The game is very short, a whopping 4 world/stages, and each stage introduces us to a new stage theme, new music, new story, new dialog, a new boss at the end… it’s like a whole new adventure every stage! WOW!

The game play is one of the things that made this game a travesty of creation and reality.

The game started as a joke. It was a side scrolling shooter, sports, puzzle, platformer, role playing, rhythm game. If ever a game were genre spanning, it’s this one.

That may sound a little intimidating, so let’s take a minute and break it down a bit.

Game play is side scrolling shooter. That’s the basic world you’re going to live in. All that other stuff we talked about before comes from the weapon pickups you find throughout the stage.

1. Pea Shooter. Shoots peas. Generally awful, but the bullets go forward. That’s rare for this game.
2. Puzzle Gun: Ever play one of them puzzle bobble type games? The Puzzle gun is aimed up and down to find the angle you want, you fire a “bobble” if you chain multiple bobbles of the same color you do big damage.
3. Platformer Gun: This gun fire a little guy. Fire again and the little guy jumps. If the little guy runs into an enemy he does a little bit of damage. If you can get him to jump on an enemy he’ll do extra damage.
4. Dance Gun: This is the DDR gun. You fire the gun and have to press the corresponding arrow button to do extra damage.
5. Arcade Gun: Fire Pac-Man. Control Pac-Man. Pac-Man. Pac-Man.
6. Sports Gun: Your aim constantly changes, you fire golf balls, they bounce around. You can fire up to 5 at a time.
7. RPG Gun: This gun fires a menu. You select an option from the menu. You have a physical sword attack, a magic attack, a heal ability, and run. Running takes you off the screen for a few seconds.

Lots of weapons to choose from. Most of them are actually kind of terrible. But they’re not supposed to be good, they’re supposed to be interesting. And that they are.

Each stage has a theme based on the boss of the stage. There’s a food stage, a pop idol stage, and an RPG stage. That RPG stage, by the way, is of the tabletop variety. D20’s flying all over the place.

The graphics are cartoony and silly and bright and colorful and crisp and just fun. Get ready to hear that a lot.

Character design is really good, enemies are all appropriate for their respective stages and the backgrounds all work out well too. They’re your basic starfield background but they contain artifacts that are relevant to the theme you’re dealing with.

The music is equally eclectic. For example the RPG stage is very influenced by a specific series from that Squaresoft company. And the credit song is legit gorgeous and I love it. I even did a cover it a while ago. It might be here on the website somewhere.

So this is a game that started off as, literally, an April Fool’s Joke… but the WayForward folks pulled it off. It’s short, which is good. It’s kind of insane, which is good. Above all, though, it’s just fun. Any longer and I think it would have overstayed it’s welcome and the charm would have come off. Any shorter and you’d be left wanting more.