![]() Acceptable violations of trust and exploitation.The notion of the curse and what, in this game, it does or doesn’t mean.The use of media as a way to communicate power – there’s an undercurrent message of the literal power of words as containers of ideas.The use of crossfades as sleep leading to a narrative following an extremely sleepy character.How do spaces exist to rules of the universe? What’s the identity of a building to magic?.It presents an essentialism of self, expressed through magic. How who you are connects to how your power expresses itself.There’s a message undercurrent in the whole story about attaining power, and the ways to do it that are both legitimate and illegitimate.The game has a motif of being your own savior, but it also shows every character as someone rescued by someone else.There’s a list of things I wanted to talk about. It’s a Light Novel plot of a game, and it benefits from that rather than rails against it. As with other series I’ve talked about and loved, Hustle Cat is a game with a strong, consistant framework for what it considers a good relationship, the appropriate use of violence, and acceptable uses of power. This blog isn’t the Hustle Cat Show, after all. There’s a whole bunch of fascinating stuff put into this game and while I’d love to do it, there’s only so much time. Look, there’s a lot in this game that I could unpack and talk about at length. ![]() Graves’ behaviour is by most standards bad, but when you see the outcomes of how it relates to the characters’ lives, you might think otherwise. This makes Hustle Cat a hypertextual game, where each path’s plot is informed by replaying the game, and knowledge of how other characters are living their lives gleaned from playing their route helps to inform you about what characters’ behaviour really is. I’m not a fan of this, but in Hustle Cat they lean into it – if your only option is to play the game six times, they’ll try to make all six character options not dreadful, unlike a lot of VNs with their obligatory One Total Asshole character count. I’m used to Visual Novels being pretty obtuse about finding routes, and with many of them the only real choice is to replay them and to make the opposite choice to what you did last time, pursuing something that makes the game react differently. There’s an interesting conversation to be had in this game about how you’re trying to anticipate the game’s idea of what it thinks you should be doing. The problem of doing poorly at work, or the rewards for doing well are completely meaningless – Avery cares about not disappointing their coworkers. One of my favourite details about Avery is that despite the overwhelming power over their life that the Cat Cafe seems to potentially have, there’s no official reprimand or use of that power I ever see. Avery’s a sweet character, and the world they inhabit is basically a much nicer version of the world we live in. Hustle Cat’s protagonist, Avery Grey is an explicit attempts to push back against the too-generic VN Protagonist that I see mostly as a convention of Japanese porn games rather than the English Language Visual Novel scene. This is due to some awareness in the planning stages, and it serves the game well. You can be an enby who uses he/him or a girl who uses they/them. It allows for he/him, she/her, and they/them, but it also doesn’t actually attach a gender to that – characters never call you a girl, or a boy. Hustle Cat sets its tone clearly when it lets you pick your pronouns – and even tells you that you can change them any time you want. With that in mind, I’d like to tell you why Hustle Cat is really good. Visual Novels, more than other games don’t have much to engage you except characters and story, and that means that this not-small purchase has to live or die on whether or not those are good. What if I don’t like it? the fear creeps in the back of my mind. For me, the VN has always been an entity of the affordable, and that means part of me recoils at paying that much for it. There’s a bunch of good free ones, there’s a few that are good and cheap, and there are some – very few – that actually crest into this space. Some folk like Visual Novels because being a fan of Visual Novels is cheap. Without those other ‘game’ bits to recommend them, Hustle Cat offers itself to you as a very pure experience of here are hot characters, you can smooch them. This puts it in the higher price bracket of visual novels, comparable to a Danganronpa game, which have voice acting, animation and mini-games. ![]() It’s a more expensive title here in Australia – $30, and the US price is $20. ![]() You can get Hustle Cat on itch.io and Steam.
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