Thanks to Rawr Labs for the review code

Title: Tamagoneko
System: Nintendo Switch (eShop)
Price: $5.99
Release Date: 09/19/2024

Story

In this game you are a platforming cat out to rescue eggs scattered across several worlds! Not much of a plot here, just gameplay action once things get going! Been a good while since I covered a simple eShop platformer, so I figured I’d do it again.

Presentation

Tamagoneko is a pretty typical looking 2D platformer spread out across several typical looking worlds. The stage-by-stage action is rather simplistic with not much that stood out visually to me, though I will note how the world map is in a cool low-poly style. Unfortunately, this makes the map screen really drop a lot of frames, and it kinda bewilders me with how jarring it is to go from mostly stable game levels to a laggy feeling world map. At least you barely spend much time in said map, and seamlessly go from one stage to the next upon clearing it, but it does lead to a jarring transition.

The music isn’t much to write home about either, in one ear, out of the other. I noticed a few tunes with some cool Genesis-like samples to them, but the actual melodies remained forgettable, even if none of them sounded bad to my ears. Still, I spent nearly two hours playing the stages and can’t describe how a single one of them sounded music wise.

Gameplay

In Tamagoneko, you must reach the cat egg at the end of each stage! Right off the bat the game shows the sort of precision action it wants you to do, from carefully avoiding insta-death spikes or other hazards and slowly weaning your way between tricky hazards. Yep, it’s another precision platformer, and first impressions were rather decent, even if none of what I saw surprised me in any way.

While progressing through the stages, you’ll be collecting gems scattered around the levels, along with optional hidden pieces of fruit. These fruit are almost always hidden in dangerous places, and if you die before reaching a checkpoint or a goal, you gotta reobtain them again, same with the gems.

Your cat starts out being able to jump, run, crawl and grab onto foreground objects, being able to gain new abilities in different worlds as they allow for it, such as the ability to wall jump. You also have the ability to toggle your default movement between a walk and a run, which makes it easier to get going quickly if you want to rush into things or speedrun the level.

Each level is made for their world’s set of abilities in mind, so clearing levels in world 2 won’t give you the ability to wall climb in World 1. For the most part I found the stages to be mostly fair, as each level is relatively short and respawn times are fast. If a stage is a bit longer than normal, it’ll have a checkpoint to make things a bit easier. With that said, there were a few times where I’d get a bit irritated by some level design choices. For one, there are moments where a teleporter can be used to go to the next part of the stage, and more often than not they’d drop you into a situation where you’d have a literal split second to react before dying. Considering that teleporting will make the screen scroll to another part of the stage, you’ll more often than not be unaware of what you’re even getting into the first time you enter one, making some levels pretty frustrating until you memorize it via trial and error.

In fact most of my more frustrating deaths were from obstacles that you have barely any time to react to the first time you encounter them, but at the very least the platforming itself was fine enough once I memorized the hazard. There were very rare moments where a frame hitch would mess up a jump of mine, but these weren’t that frequent and unlike the world map the game was smooth enough for me to still enjoy controlling on my Switch lite. Just a simple precision platformer with new interesting mechanics getting thrown your way, and a ton of in-game achievements and unlockables to obtain if you want to go for all of it. Yes, you can customize the cat and go nuts with the gems you collected, and make it look like other breeds of cats, give it a silly effect, or even a goofy costume.

Conclusion

Ultimately, Tamagoneko is a fine platformer. The stages are simple and introduce new mechanics with each world, and the platforming is decent enough. The occasional frame dips within the stages are annoying, and I felt that a few of the hazards were cheap and mandated trial and error, but otherwise I still had enough fun with my time spent across several worlds, even if Tamagoneko doesn’t do anything that makes the game stand out from a bunch of other precision platformers I’ve played over the past ten years.

There are fun customization options to unlock and cool secrets to discover, but other than that this really does feel like a pretty safe, decent platformer that I wish had a bit less reliance on trial and error and some more engaging level design to make it stand out from the rest of the pack. Still, if you need a set of challenging platforming stages to kill time on, Tamagoneko isn’t a bad way to do it and the game isn’t afraid to have fun with itself in the process.

I give Tamagoneko a 6 out of 10.