Cat Girl Without Salad – An April’s Fool Come True!

To put context to this game, WayForward announced this title as an April’s Fool joke back in 2013 with outlandish claims along the lines of coming exclusively to 3DS, DS, Wii, Wii U, XBLA, PSN, PC, Vita, iOS and Android… Yeah, “exclusively”. The game would also include several game genre such as strategy, fighting, rhythm, arcade, horror… well, you get the point, just list every genre really. They also included the “screenshot” shown below to display the game.

Now, 3 years later, WayForward actually developed the game as a Humble Monthly exclusive. The actual title does not possess all the claims of the April’s Fool version as it is only available on Windows. The game also does not include all the genres but still features a wide variety being a schmup that features rhythm, arcade, sports, platformer, puzzler and RPG elements. For the featured release, they have cleaned up the art, making it much less clustered and smooth. Keeping true though, the title screen does show up the colorfulness and up beat music featuring this light hearted game whose story is quite simple, you are an intergalactic neko bounty hunter named Kebako doing her job hunting bounties with her trusted assistant across the universe.

You may ask “But Pentavus, how does a schmup contain elements of so many different genre?” and I wouldn’t blame you for asking. WayForward designed all of the power up as game cartridges to upgrade your Pea Shooter into other weapons changing the way your weapons functions entirely. Each upgrade is lost upon getting hit once however.

The guns featured are very straightforward. Your basic gun is the Pea Shooter, shooting green “peas” at your enemies in a straight line.

There is the Sports Gun which gives you an aim that moves back and forth letting you shoot golf balls that bounce off of enemy and the screen’s edge.

The Arcade Gun features a cat-like pac-man-like bullet that you control using A,B,X,Y on your game pad (or arrows on keyboard or X,O, Square, Triangle on a PS controller like I used) across the screen and through enemies. The Arcade Gun also seems to deal extra damage to ghost enemies.

There is a Puzzle Gun which lets you shoot colored orbs that stick into place upon enemy contact. You aim using A and Y, shooting with X or B. Matching three of the same color with produce an effect on the field as well.

The Platformer Gun shoots off a small robot-like character in a straight line. If you hit the shoot button again, the character with jump. The character dies if hitting an enemy directly but deals extra damage if you jump on top of their head.

The hardest gun to use is by far the Dance Gun, making your gun extremely weak unless you shoot to the rhythm of the flashing arrows scrolling near the bottom of the screen. However, if you manage to keep up with the inputs while dodging enemies, the bullets are much stronger and it does pay off.

My favorite by far is the RPG Gun that features 3 modes (4 really but I never tried using Flee… Sorry, I may be french but I’m no coward!). Attack, Magic, Heal and Flee are the modes for this weapon. Attack lets you swing a gunblade by taking a step forward and swinging it. The Magic lets you toss a potion bomb in an upward arch that will explode on contact. The Heal option lets you recover HP. All modes have cooldowns so you can only use them a few times each before having to wait for the refresh which is fair as this weapon will kill any of the common enemies in 1 hit with Attack.

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Completing the game will lead to a recap of the three levels while credit roll, ending with a cute art of Kebako taking a little cat nap, exhausted from her adventures. To incite replayability, you unlock the Gun Select mode which lets you switch gun on the fly instead of waiting for a power up cartridge. Each boss also feature a Mercy/Cruelty ending making at least a second playthrough worth it.

It is to note that this game is not for sale currently and was included in the May 2016 bundle for Humble Monthly. This title may be available in the future but for now, the occasion to pick it up as passed.

You can see the full play through of this Humble Monthly Exclusive below!

Humble Monthly is a monthly service that delivers plenty of games for the low price of 12$ a month. The past few bundles contained exclusives much like Cat Girl Without Salad and more known title like Ark: Survival Evolved, Rocket League and Mad Max. We are not sponsored by Humble Bundle, this is from me personally finding it to be a good service.