Cattails: Wildwood Story Review

A sweet colony sim, adventure kinda game in which there is so much to do. Building up your colony, befriending cats and even marrying one of them, while also fighting against something evil. 30h to 100%, no missable achievements.

Approximate amount of time to 100%: 30h
Estimated achievement difficulty: 5/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 1
Is there a good guide available: You don’t need a guide
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: No
Grinding Achievements: That is a tough question, 3 mines with each 100 levels felt a bit grindy
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: No, you can play on the easiest level and still unlock all the achievements
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No

Cattails: Wildwood Story is a sweet colony sim where you try to rebuild your cat colony. You finally found a new spot to build the temple and to live in peace… but will there be peace? Some strange things are going on, starting with a weird dream that every cat in the colony has, but it doesn’t end there….

When I started playing C:WS I had no idea what to really expect as I haven’t played the first game in the series. I was welcomed by a sweet game in which you can do a lot of things and are rewarded for everything you do. I had no problems understanding the story, so it isn’t necessary to have played the first game in the series.

When you start a new game, there is a character customization option, which gives you a whole lot of options, and you can name your character whatever you want. Another awesome thing is that it has a lot of accessibility options, and you can choose the speed of how fast the days move by. I hope that in the future they will also add a motion sickness option, because in the 3rd mine, in the last 50 levels, there was one type of location that made me really sick with motion sickness. I managed to get through those, but don’t ask how. I hope they can change something about those levels so that the clouds there are optional. I didn’t have motion sickness at all in the rest of the game, just this library-type environment with clouds in the 3rd mine.

What I loved about Cattails: Wildwood Story is how much there is to do, you can progress in the mines, befriend other cats, recruit new cats, customize your home, progress the story, gather and hunt, and increase the area of your colony in some sort of on-going tug of war event. In my playthrough, I focussed too much on one thing at a time and I wish I had started earlier with talking to all the cats daily to increase my friend level with them sooner, as this results in very cute clips of the cats interacting with each other.

There are no missable achievements in Cattails: Wildwood Story. They are all for progressing through all the different aspects of the game. I love that there is an achievement screen in-game where you can see which achievements you’re missing as well as a counter of how far you’re with that specific achievement. As stated above, I wish I had focussed more on befriending every cat early on, but in the end, it didn’t matter. My last achievement was the one for playing for 3 in-game years, and I reached that by sleeping through summer, fall and winter in the third year.

The most challenging achievement by far is the one for going through the third mine. I got this by playing very carefully, taking glimmer with me, and taking my time to heal them. Even if that meant waiting for 30 seconds till the cooldown of the healing spell was over to heal them again.

Cattails: Wildwood Story is such a sweet game, with so much to do in it. I loved it because of that. If I didn’t feel like doing X, I could always focus on something else and come later back to X.

This review for Cattails: Wildwood Story was written on 22 Oktober 2023, based on the current Steam version of the game which has 60 achievements at the time of writing this review. This information can be outdated, for example, when the developer adds or removes achievements or releases (new) DLC.