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CATO: Buttered Cat
game
•7/14/2026

CATO: Buttered Cat

byMalastin
SteamNintendo Switch
8.7
The Verdict
"CATO: Buttered Cat had every excuse to be forgettable. A meme premise, a small studio, a single mechanic. Instead, Malastin built a full, confident puzzle-platformer that respects your intelligence and rewards mastery, then wrapped it in co-op so good it changes 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 quibbles against a design this coherent. Buy it, grab a friend, and watch a stupid internet joke land better than most games with ten times the budget."

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Key Features

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.
Seamless 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 best arguments for the mode this year.
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 Good

A genuinely novel mechanic that turns a meme into real design
Exceptional co-op that reframes the whole experience
Clean escalation from tutorial to expert
Massive content density: 200+ levels, hidden rooms, 70+ skins

The Bad

Late-game difficulty spikes hard—not for everyone
A few levels lean on character-shuttling busywork
Solo play can be mentally taxing over long sessions
Minor animation stiffness on some fused transitions

In-Depth Review

Bottom Line: A daft internet meme becomes one of the smartest cooperative puzzle-platformers in years. Malastin builds an entire mechanical language around a dumb joke—and the joke lands, buttered-side down, every time.

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 Malastin never lets the novelty coast. The onboarding is a masterclass in 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. Players consistently flag the back half as a genuine spike, and they're right. 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 the players who actually internalized 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, you feel the drop.

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.

Editorial Disclaimer

The reviews and scores on this site are based on our editorial team's independent analysis and personal opinions. While we strive for objectivity, gaming experiences can be subjective. We are not compensated by developers for these scores.