Catlateral Damage Scratching At The Door Next Week

The Internet is fond of cats, and why wouldn't it be? Cats are perfectly suited to the medium of the Internet. From the earliest days of the World Wide Web, cats were being cute in short text stories. Then we gained small, heavily compressed images which were bad for many subjects but just dandy for cats. Then animated gifs, YouTube videos... cats have scaled adorably with technology. Soon you can even use the Internet to be a cat yourself.

Catlateral Damage [official site], the crowdfunded first-person smash-o-platformer about a jerk cat knocking everything off shelves, is due to launch downloadable next week.

It's a simple pitch: you're a bored cat, so you roam around knocking over and breaking everything you can get your paws on. Its procedurally-generated levels include houses, supermarkets, log cabins, and museums - with a dinosaur skeleton you can trash. You naughty cat you. It's not wanton destruction, mind: you earn points for it all, and points add meaning to everything and make it all right.

Fire Hose Games announced yesterday that it'll launch next Wednesday, May 27th, for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It'll be on Steam, and available DRM-free in some way too.

Catlateral Damage started life out as a simple demo, a cute one-room novelty fun for a few minutes, but became a bigger, fancier game after raising $61,944 (£40k) on Kickstarter last year. I still have a sneaking suspicion I might find the novelty wears out quickly, but I live with a jerk cat so perhaps it's more harrowing for me than many.