Review: Cat Quest 3 is a Purr-Fect Pirate Adventure

Cat Quest 3 is the latest in a series of adorable little action RPGs that have attracted a small but loyal audience. For the third game, the typical medieval setting has been ditched in favor of one based on pirates. And this high seas swashbuckler is one that you’ll want to get your paws on.

In Cat Quest 3, you play as an unnamed young cat pirate heading out on his first adventure with the ghost of veteran pirate Captain Cappey. Your adventure starts on a small island in the Purribean where you steal a ship and set off to find the mysterious North Star Treasure. Along the way, you have to deal with rival pirate captains all with their own plans for the booty.

This start sets a great impression. You’re immediately introduced to the various aspects of combat, which mainly consists of a melee weapon, a ranged weapon and a spell. Then you get a ship and can head off into the world after breaking the flimsy barrier between you and freedom. And I do mean freedom, as the world is fully explorable from the start of the game, although certain corners of the map will likely stomp you into a fur rug without a little levelling.

The Purribean Sea of Cat Quest 3 is small but dense. It’s an assortment of islands dotted around the ocean, all containing their own secrets and treasures. The ability to sail around all these places right out the gate offers a huge amount of freedom. Even within the story, you never fully feel like you’re being funneled into a specific direction. While there is a direct line of events that need to be followed, many of your objectives branch off into multiple locations that can tackled in any order, whether that’s collecting keys for a tower or defeating different pirate captains.

Tucked away between these main objectives are a ton of additional side stories, such as a lovelorn rat whose ghost still haunts his castle or a convoluted mail delivery chain that involves a wedding and a deep-seated rivalry. These side stories make exploring the world of Cat Quest 3 a joy. While you’re journeying to find where the game wants you to go, you’ll trip over countless side activities along the way. There is never a dull moment here.

The game is also determined to immerse you in its map, avoiding a lot of the tedium and bloat that can sometimes infect the open world genre. While your objectives will be marked on your map in the menu, the main game has no non-diegetic markers aside from an optional one you can place yourself. This forces you to use the environment around you to navigate, which I’m always a fan of. It helps that the map is small enough to become familiar without feeling too limited.

It manages to introduce the world to you without holding your hand too much. Your initial guides around the world are star towers that point vaguely where you need to go, but you have to triangulate with multiple towers to find your objective. In the process, you quickly become aware of which islands are where, and soon navigating this map becomes second nature. It happens to organically that I didn’t notice how little I was using the map for navigation until about halfway through the game. I simply headed off in whatever felt the natural direction at the time.

Combat in Cat Quest 3 is something you’ll find yourself spending a lot of time doing. It’s simple action-adventure fare, with a single attack button, a weapon switch and some optional spells, but the way these elements are brought together is surprisingly deep. There are multiple types of melee and ranged weapon, creating a range of combinations. You can attack with a sword, a shield or claws. The shield is slow and heavy, but offers more defense, while the claws are risky but speedy.

Meanwhile, ranged weapons include guns and wands, which offer different combat styles. Equipping the Meowchine Gun will give you weaker damage per shot but a massive clip, while the blunderbuss type weapons are powerful but can only fire a couple of shots before needing to be reloaded. Clothing and other equipment also adds a wide range of additional abilities, such as the ability to heal while attacking. The result of this is a combat system with a heavy amount of customization, making it suitable for anyone’s play style.

Combat also offers plenty of challenge. It’s not Dark Souls by any means, but there will be times where boss encounters will cause you some difficulties. Some fights might crush you unless you swap out your equipment to combat elemental damage, while others require alertness and liberal use of the dodge mechanic. This goes for ship combat too, especially as you get to more unique ships within the Meowtallica and Captain Takomeowki fleets. Ship combat against the captains’ flagships is especially stressful, as some of them can become slow-moving bullet hells. And every single one of these fights is a lot of fun, even when you’re beaten.

The story adds to the fun too. Cat Quest 3 has a simple plot, where you are racing against other pirates for a vague treasure that hides secrets, but the execution is fantastic. This is not a game that takes itself too seriously, most obvious in how many puns are baked into the game’s writing. Your enemies are actually called “pi-rats” and “meow” and “purr” are tossed liberally into any sentence that will fit them (and even a few that don’t). Every character you meet is goofy and charming, often with absurd quirks. But there’s also heart here too, as your protagonist and Captain Cappey develop a close friendship. You’ll fall in love with every single member of this cast.

Visually, Cat Quest 3 has a lot going for it too. It’s reminiscent of Square Enix’s HD-2D style, with layered 2D sprites mixed with 3D models in a diorama-style view. The characters sprites are adorable, especially the main character. He’s got a happy little face on him and seems to be having the time of his life in every animation. Even the save animation, where he hops into an immediate nap for recovery, is aggressively cute.

Cat Quest 3 is an excellent game, so much so that I’m scrambling to find criticism of it. It could maybe benefit from a fast travel system or a method to improve the speed of your ship. It could be seen as a little too short, clocking in at around ten hours if you really explore the world. The cat puns may become a little excessive at times. And that’s really all I can find to criticise it. Even then, many of these aren’t an issue for me, as the game’s density of content makes up for the length, the lack of fast travel may contribute to how intuitive the world is and the cat puns were all part of the charm.

I loved my time with Cat Quest 3. Exploration is joyful, combat is a lot of fun and the story is silly and charming in all the right ways. If you want a small but dense pirate adventure full of good humor, Cat Quest 3 is for you.

Cat Quest 3 is out now for PC, PS5, PS4, Switch, Xbox Series X/S and Xbox One.