HIDDEN CATS 7: Cookie Town Review (PC)

If there’s any one combination that we know works all too well, it’s hidden object games and feline centerpieces. Take Cats Hidden in Georgia (or the Cats Hidden anthology, in general) or the 100 Cats series, for example. If we go by the celebratory nature of the well-bred synergy, then we can more or less settle on the notion that the likes of HIDDEN CATS 7: Cookie Town automatically falls into a “winning” formula. And sure, while you could argue that it aligns itself with a somewhat recyclable concept, there’s no denying the fact that kittens and magnifying glasses bode incredibly well for cozy gamers.

The seventh installment in the episodic search-and-paint series from Very Very Little Studio comes with a fresh trail of cookie crumbs for you to comb through, as well as an entire palette of confectionary delights for you to paint and embelish over a sizable sugar-coated scrapbook excursion. With waffle houses, pancake towers, and lemonade pools, to boot, Cookie Town comes clean with one of the most aesthetically appealing drawings to date. Granted, the market is teeming with similar artworks, and the competition isn’t exactly short of ravenous ilk hungry for the rim of the petri dish. Yet, there is something here that makes HIDDEN CATS feel all the more inviting. For better or worse, let’s just blame the surplus of carbs.

Of course, the idea here is as straightforward as it was before: players actively scrub through a black-and-white drawing with a traditional pinch-and-crop mechanic, and then highlight the cats that snuggly barricade themselves somewhere in the background. Like before, for every cat that you successfully locate, another piece of the canvas finds its natural vibrancy, and slowly but surely, the illustration returns to its former idyllic quality. In other words, the more cats you find, the brighter the image gets. A simple concept, but a universally accepted one, nonetheless.

The Cats of Cookie Town

Cookie Town openly embraces the cookie cutter nature of its faithful blueprint with a follow-up chapter that takes the same ingredients and progression tropes as its predecessors and, in an effort to appeal to the ravenous demographic, spruces them up with a timeless candy-centric aesthetic and a few well-integrated quality-of-life UI improvements.

Conceptually, there isn’t a lot here to split the link with its forefathers, as it is, with all due respect, more or less the same experience. The main difference here, of course, is the location: a flapjack-baked kingdom of clotted creams and sugary lidos, waffle plateaus and doughy pancake cones. The rest, however, remains a part of the furniture, with 200 feline subjects forming the backbone of the game’s seek-and-find experience, and a scrubbable sketchbook that allows players to comb and analyze intricate details before scratching off one of hundreds of kittens. (If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it — and all that jazz.)

To give credit where credit is due, HIDDEN CATS 7: Cookie Town delivers a sketchbook level that is, in all honestly, incredibly feast-worthy and a little more-ish compared with its prequels. Again, it doesn’t boast an original composition, and it certainly isn’t the first of its kind to merge red lollipops and ice cream scoops together, either. And yet, there’s a simple pleasure here that we know soothes the soul and remediates the emotional baggage that we launder. It’s simple fun, and it welcomes that moniker without being overly ambitious.

If the Cookie Crumbles

Similar to its scrub-and-paint adversaries, HIDDEN CATS 7: Cookie Town has a short episodic sequence that includes a platitude of nooks and crannies for you to unfold, and an all-in-one tool that allows you to scale and manipulate the canvas. All in all it’s a short experience that can be swept beneath the rug in an hour, give or take. Could it do with a few additional subjects to help boost its appeal? Maybe, but 200 seems to be a well-rounded target that feels both achievable and unthreatening, nonetheless.

Suffice it to say that, gameplay-wise, there isn’t too much to write home about here. Having said that, Cookie Town isn’t really a game that you would turn to in order to scratch that itch. On the other hand, it is a great pocket-sized fidget puzzler that can easily keep your thumbs twiddling for short periods of time while you merrily hop between alternate genres. With a clean UI and a useful built-in hint system to aid your efforts, it serves its purpose as a graceful and adorably wholesome indie seek-and-find experience that will, with any luck, satisfy your undying sugar cravings for a pre-evening festive banquet. And that’s all that this is: a cookie-clotted appetizer that just feels good to wolf down. It isn’t perfect, but it certainly gets the job done.

Verdict

HIDDEN CATS 7: Cookie Town fortifies its esteemed reputation as an adorably cozy search-and-paint installment in Very Very Little Studio’s beloved sketchbook anthology, with a fresh peppering of guilty pleasures and cookie-caked delights for biomes, and a familiar yet easy-to-digest suite of embellishment tools to offer that little extra creative freedom over its cutesy composition. At its heart it’s still the same HIDDEN CATS , but with that extra pinch of heart and soul, courtesy of its sugar-coated aesthetic and general quality-of-life features.

While it’s certainly no secret that feline-centric hidden object games are a dime-a-dozen thing, I will argue that HIDDEN CATS 7: Cookie Town bears the brunt of one of the most charming candy-themed scrapbook locales on the market. It isn’t a new game, and it still falls beneath the same umbrella as dozens, if not hundreds of cat-centric paintbrush puzzlers. That being said, it captures and conveys a peaceful solution that we can’t help but love to indulge in every once in a blue moon. Perhaps that’s enough to warrant your time, perhaps not.

It goes without saying at this point, but if you did happen to enjoy scrubbing through Very Very Little Studio’s earlier chapters in the HIDDEN CATS series, then there’s no reason as to why you wouldn’t want to sink your paws into Cookie Town. It’s cheap, cheerful, and a perfectly more-ish appetizer that should keep you satisfied for an hour or two between proteins.