Thanks to Ratalaika Games for the review code
Title: Alien Cat 2 – Retro Collection
System: Nintendo Switch (eShop)
Price: $4.99
Release Date: 06/19/2026
Story
In this spacefaring puzzle game, you take control of an Alien Cat who crash lands on a hostile planet with his goldfish and must complete an assortment of puzzles to rebuild his rocket ship and go back home. Not much else to it, and no, Alien Cat 1 doesn’t exist. This is an assortment of retro ports of the game, ranging from 8-16 bit consoles.
Presentation
The normal Shinyuden UI returns, with the usual caveats I repeat over and over and over by now. Screen size, manual scans, filters, etc, you know the drill. Thankfully on behalf of this being a modern release for the consoles represented in this collection, Alien Cat 2 has the cleanest manual scan of any of these modern Shinyuden ports to date, and it gets the job done pretty well and explaining what you need to do in this game. Otherwise you have the NES, SMS, SNES, and Genesis versions to play here, all pretty darn identical, with the Genesis one having come first.
The game itself looks fine for the most part, and no system really perfects the visuals of such a simple puzzler, so it adjusts fine to whatever console this game gets thrown at. I wouldn’t say we’ve gotten to Xeno Crisis levels of ports with this one, but it still did get a lot of ports that all look fine and don’t stand out much from one another. The music is 8-Bit in the 8-Bit versions, and it is rather catchy, but not much to write home about otherwise.
Unfortunately, there is one pretty gnarly emulation issue I encountered, and that was with the NES version. For some bizarre reason, at random a huge audio delay when picking up items could crop up in that version, and only that version. It’s such a distraction I couldn’t really play that version for more than a minute before dumping it in favor of the SMS version for the 8 bit experience, but otherwise there isn’t much to note with the emulation here, and every other aspect seems to work OK. Bizarrely, when I went back to play it later, it seemed to work fine with proper audio, but then the rewind got all weird and stuttery, even on Switch 2. So it seems the NES version just has some weird quirk with the emulation where your milage may vary.
Gameplay
While this is a collection, I am not doing my usual collection routine here; all the versions are pretty identical and you honestly should just pick your favorite based off the system you like more. Just note the Genesis version came first, so tweaks made in the other three versions didn’t exist in that one. Anyhow in this game you take control of the alien cat, who must move around in a square environment, collecting parts, avoiding enemies and hazards to prevent a weirdly violent death. Yeah, if you step on a mine he explodes in two with blood (not an overkill amount at least).
What starts off incredibly simple at first ends up getting more complicated as the game goes on, naturally for such a puzzle game. You’ll eventually end up with a clone that you’ll also be controlling at the same time, and they both have to avoid all the obstacles and walk carefully in order to collect all the keys. Collect all the parts within the stage, avoid the enemies and hazards, and you’ll open a portal for the cats to walk into and escape the level. Repeat over and over and you win, and this game is real short at around 20 stages.
The difficulty ramps up quite fast around the halfway point, requiring a bit more thinking with moving clones around, but ultimately whichever version you choose to stick with, you pretty much have a short but decent puzzler to enjoy here. SMS ended up being my favorite of the four, followed by the SNES version, but outside of the presentation changes I can’t really say the versions are different enough to have all of them here.
Conclusion
Alien Cat 2 is a pretty decent puzzle game, and the four versions represented in this collection are decent. Outside of the Genesis version lacking some presentational quirks due to being the original console version, it genuinely doesn’t matter what version you go with here, and I was a bit bummed to not see each version have their own set of levels to go through, as that would make including all the variants here make a lot more sense.
NES bugginess aside, there really isn’t much to complain about here with this set. You get a fun little puzzler, you have multiple flavors to enjoy said puzzler in, and the twenty stages are a decent little challenge. I wish there was more to Alien Cat 2, but for the low price and the usual QOL, I think this set is sufficient, even if the word Collection might be stretching things.
I give Alien Cat 2 – Retro Collection a 6 out of 10.