Review of Nom Cat Game on Facebook Messenger

It’s hard to find a game that’s more chock-full of memes and pop culture references than Nom Cat.

It has a hipster cat, walker cat, Steve Jobs cat, and a thug life cat, to name a few.

And oh, it’s also got the internet’s most famous cats, including Grumpy Cat and Nyan Cat.

The game’s creators weren’t kidding when they said they were on a mission to “create mobile pixel art games with a pop-culture twist”!

Nom Cat was one of the two new Instant Games titles that Facebook Messenger dished out over the weekend. We haven’t published a review in quite a while, so we’re excited to have new game material to write about!

Gameplay

You control two cats who are on an “endless feeding frenzy”. Although the word frenzy might conjure up images of a messy feast, our cats are as calm as they come. They just sit prettily while food is thrown at them.

Their diet consists of two kinds of fish–regular ones and gold ones. While the former is just for getting points, the latter can be used to unlock more cats, so it’s good to collect as many gold fish as possible.

Even though these cats are capable of consuming massive quantities of food, they need some prodding to eat their food. Your job then is to make them open their mouths to catch all the fish, and you do this by tapping and holding on the screen.

Seems a bit too simple and easy?

We thought so too. But boy, were we mistaken!

Simple Yet Challenging

Two factors make gameplay quite challenging:

1. Bombs are thrown in with the fish. A cat who swallows a bomb will explode and turn to char.
2. Catching fish is an all-or-nothing business. You miss a single fish, and both cats cry a river of inconsolable tears. (Note: This applies only to the regular fish. Gold fish can bounce, and you’d still be good).

These two things are basically opposites of each other. You need to have your fingers pressed on the screen to catch all the fish, while you need to lift your fingers to avoid the swallowing the bombs.

And when half a dozen bombs and fish are up in the air all at the same time, your fingers are bound to get confused.

This is one game where an excellent hand-eye coordination is super important.

A Game for Collectors

People with a penchant for hoarding stuff will be drawn to this game.

The first few times you play the game, you may have the compulsion to try and break your previous high scores.

But you’ll soon find out that what will draw you to the game is the collecting business.

Using 50 gold fish, you can buy different backgrounds. There are 4 available at the moment (the default kitchen, city with a river view, a quaint seaport, and Japan in the spring).

The backgrounds are awesome in themselves, but even more awesome is that each one comes with its own music. Good job, devs!

But you’re not playing just to collect backgrounds! You’re here for the kitties!

With 50 gold fish, you can win a prize via the golden Maneki-neko (Japanese fortune cat). The prizes are drawn from the game’s large collection of kitty characters, which as we’ve already mentioned are pop culture or meme cats.

The kitties are awarded randomly, so you’ll have to cross your fingers if you want to get Murdock the marvelous blind cat or Purrlock Holmes.

Players will keep playing just to get all cats in the collection.

Conclusion

We like Nom Cat a lot. The game is cute in an edgy kind of way. Artwork is topnotch. Background music is as cool as it gets. Gameplay banks on people’s compulsion to test their skills and/or hoard stuff, and does so effectively.

We have almost zero complaints. Which means we do have at least one minor one: Scrolling through the kitty collection is not the most user-friendly activity. We give this game an 8/10.

Each kitty in the collection has some pop culture reference, but we don’t know them all. (For example, we didn’t know what the Don Drapurr cat referred to until we googled it). Maybe we’ll research them all someday. But do tell us in the comments those you’ve already identified.