CATO: Buttered Cat

Every so often a game arrives that has no business being as good as it is. CATO: Buttered Cat, developed by Team Woll and published by GCORES PUBLISHING, is built on a shitpost. You know the one: cats always land on their feet, toast always lands buttered-side down, so strap toast to a cat and you get a spinning, hovering perpetual-motion machine. It’s the kind of premise that dies as a five-minute mobile gag. Team Woll instead treats it as a legitimate physics engine.

The result is a 2D puzzle platformer that splits your brain in two. You control the Cat—a fluid, mercurial blob that oozes through pipes but can’t jump—and the Toast, a rigid slab that bounces, wall-jumps, and charges vertical leaps but can’t move sideways on its own. Neither is complete. Each is a deliberate half of a whole, and the game’s entire vocabulary is about fusing them into that absurd floating gyroscope to cross gaps physics says you shouldn’t.

Positioned against genre royalty—Braid, Celeste, the co-op geometry of It Takes Two—CATO plays in rarefied company and mostly earns the seat. It launched September 5, 2024 on Steam and Nintendo Switch at $6.59, with over 200 levels, five themed worlds, hidden rooms, boss fights, mini-games, and 70-plus collectible skins. This is a small studio swinging at the heavyweights, and the punches connect more often than they miss. The pitch is ridiculous. The execution is not.

• The Buttered-Cat Paradox as a Mechanic: Fuse Cat and Toast to trigger perpetual spin—controlled floating and hovering that turns a meme into your primary traversal tool. It’s the whole game, and it’s genuinely novel.
• Two Halves, One Brain: The liquid Cat slides through pipes but can’t jump; the rigid Toast jumps, wall-jumps, and charges leaps but can’t walk. You’re constantly context-switching between two incompatible movesets.
• Local Co-op: Hand one character to a friend on the same couch. The design that feels clever solo becomes a communication exercise with two players—one of the stronger arguments for the mode in recent years.
• Content Density: 200-plus levels across five worlds, hidden rooms, boss battles, mini-games, and 70-plus skins. This is a full-fat adventure, not a clever demo stretched thin.

The Gameplay Loop

CATO’s core loop is a negotiation between two things that don’t want to cooperate. The Cat is horizontal thinking—flow, squeeze, slide. The Toast is vertical thinking—bounce, charge, climb. Alone, each hits a wall within seconds. The magic is in the fusion: combine them and the paradox kicks in, generating that infinite spin that lets the pair hover and drift across hazards neither could clear alone.

What makes this sing is that Team Woll never lets the novelty coast. The onboarding is a model of restraint. Early levels isolate each character’s quirks—here’s a pipe only the Cat fits through, here’s a ledge only the Toast reaches—before the game starts demanding you hold both mental models at once. By world three, you’re separating the duo to solve one half of a room, then reuniting them mid-air to solve the other. The cognitive load ramps hard, and the game trusts you to keep up.

That trust cuts both ways. The difficulty curve is fair but unsentimental. Later levels stack timing, spatial reasoning, and precise input into single sequences that punish hesitation. This is not a game that holds your hand to the credits. It hands you a set of rules and expects mastery.

Where the Design Earns Its Keep

The best puzzle platformers make you feel stupid, then brilliant, in the span of ten seconds. CATO nails that rhythm. Solutions are rarely about execution alone—they’re about reframing. You stop asking “how do I jump there” and start asking “how do I make the paradox carry me there.” The moment the mental model flips is the payoff, and CATO delivers it repeatedly across 200 levels without the mechanic going stale. That’s the hard part, and it’s the part most physics-gimmick games fail.

The collectibles and hidden rooms aren’t filler either. They’re tuned as optional difficulty—side rooms that ask more of you than the critical path, rewarding players who internalize the systems. The 70-plus skins are pure whimsy, but they give completionists a reason to comb every corner.

If there’s friction, it’s that the two-character split can occasionally feel more like an admin task than a puzzle. A handful of levels lean on shuttling one character back and forth in ways that read as busywork rather than insight. It’s rare. But when a game this sharp asks you to just move the Toast over there again, the drop is noticeable.

Solo, you’re a one-person orchestra playing two instruments. That’s satisfying, if occasionally taxing. Which brings us to the mode that reframes everything.

The pixel art is charming without being twee—expressive, readable, and legible under pressure, which matters more than it sounds. In a physics puzzler where a hazard’s exact hitbox decides whether you live, clarity is a mechanic. CATO’s art keeps the Cat, the Toast, and the danger visually distinct even when the screen fills with motion. The five worlds each carry a strong thematic identity, so the 200 levels never blur into one beige corridor.

A 2D game of this scope is light on hardware, and the design leans on a physics simulation that needs to be deterministic—the same input should produce the same arc, which is non-negotiable when chaining precise maneuvers. The fused-state animations can read slightly stiff in places, based on the available footage. It doesn’t hurt play. It just occasionally reminds you this is a compact production, not a Nintendo first-party budget.

On Steam, CATO is a keyboard-and-controller natural, and a gamepad is the sensible pick. The dual-character control scheme maps cleanly to two sets of face buttons and triggers, and analog input gives you finer control over the charged jumps. Keyboard works, but the precision the late game demands is friendlier with sticks and shoulders.

On Nintendo Switch, CATO finds its truest home. This is a couch co-op game, and the Switch is the couch co-op console. Slide off the Joy-Cons, hand one to a friend, and the local co-op works out of the box with zero setup friction. Handheld mode is where the pixel art should shine—crisp on the smaller screen—and it’s the natural pick-up-and-solve format for a level-based structure. The only caution: individual Joy-Con controls are cramped for the timing-heavy later levels, so pair mode or a Pro Controller is the move once difficulty spikes. Neither version looks like a port afterthought. Both appear built with their input model in mind.

CATO: Buttered Cat had every excuse to be forgettable. A meme premise, a small studio, a single mechanic. Instead, Team Woll built a full, confident puzzle-platformer that respects your intelligence and rewards mastery, then wrapped it in co-op strong enough to change how you read the whole game. The difficulty will lose some players in the back half, and a handful of levels mistake logistics for puzzles. Those are real reservations, but they sit comfortably inside a clear recommendation. Buy it, grab a friend, and watch a stupid internet joke land better than most games with far bigger budgets.