Heist Kitty: Cats Go a Strayis an online and local multiplayer cat simulator game where players can cause chaos as the Ultimate Cat Nuisance. InHeist Kitty, players can play through the story in single-player or team up with friends to join forces with either the Meowfia or the Purrlice. Players can traverse the streets using both expected cat behaviors like climbing virtually any surface to more unusual cat abilities, including driving cars, shooting across the open world through cat cannons, and more.
Game Rant recently interviewedHeist Kittydevelopers Carmen and Brian Rivers from LetMeowt Games LLC and Amber Silcock, Producer at Excalibur Games, about its unique cat customizer creator. Brian and Carmen also spoke about theopen-world game’s chaos and harmony systems, its influences and inspirations likeThe Legend of Zeldaas a family-friendly game development company, and more.The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
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Q:How did you come up with the idea forHeist Kitty: Cats Go a Strayand were there any key inspirations from past games or otherwise?
Carmen: It is our third game in our cat game series. We started off withCat Save Halloween,and we just had a lot of ideas. Our kids bring us a lot of inspiration, so a lot of the features that we have in the game come from them. They tell us what they like. We’re trying to kind of go for that audience of things that they enjoy playing, other kids would enjoy playing it, and other adults would enjoy playing it. We had a whole board of ideas and decided to go withHeist Kitty.
Brian:And we have two cats, so that’s part of the inspiration. When we started LetMeowt Games, we wanted to do afamily gamingcompany. We sat down with our kids – this was around the year 2020 – and asked, what do you want to do? My daughter wanted cats, she wanted cats to be able to wear hats, and she wanted to be able to decorate the cats. My son wanted monsters and skeletons and magic. We said, okay well, we can do this, and I haven’t seen this done very often.
We started small withCat Saves Halloween,then threefold that withCat Gets Medieval, and another three-fold withHeist Kitty: Cats Go a Stray. We just really love working as a family. The community we work with is awesome. The people who play our games really love them. I’m not sure if it appeals to everyone, but the people who do get on board with it really seem to really appreciate what we do. And that just creates this positive feedback loop for us. So, we have a great time doing it.
Q: So was it always about cats, or did you consider any other animals for creating carnage?
Carmen: Well, we do have two cats. There are a lot of cat videos out there, so that was just kind of our main inspiration. Not to say we wouldn’t move to other animals. We recently got a puppy, so you never know we might end up with French Bulldogs one day [laughs].
Brian:Oh, yeah! If you play throughHeist Kitty, you’ll see there’s lots ofFrench Bulldog influencein there. They might look like the bad guys to begin with, but there’s a twist.
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Q:Could you tell us more about the player’s choice to join the Purrlice vs. the Meowfia and how this impacts the gameplay?
Carmen: Those two sides, the Meowfia, is really all about their family, and making sure they’re taking care of their cat family. You can cause chaos, you do what you want to do. It’s all on your own terms.
The police side is protecting all cats’ rights. But yet, they still have a lot of fun with all their gadgets and do all sorts of crazy things. By choosing that, you get a little bit of a different side of the story. That’s the fun part about it - you could play the Purrlice side on one side and get a different idea of the storyline and just a different adventure. And then you could go over the Meowfia side and have a whole other adventure over there as well with another part of the storyline.
Brian: Yeah, the story kind of splits off in the middle and there are different areas you can go to. You join the Police Academy, and there are these obstacles. You learn how to fly a drone and drive cars and all this stuff. You get a police squad car, so lots of stuff on that side.
On the Meowfia side, there’s a whole different angle that you go down where there’s a nightclub element to it, robbing banks, and all these other things. And it might be a little bit confusing - the two sides aren’t vehemently opposed to one another. They’re not at each other’s throats. Cats are all getting along in this world. I think the main bad guys kind of unveil themselves later, but you run into a lot of animal control and folks wanting to keep cats down. I think both team sides tend to oppose that.
Carmen: Yeah, it’s just a way to explore the world a little bit differently and get a different side of the story.
Brian: And we really wanted to create some replayability in the game too.
Q: Absolutely - how do you choose? They both sound really fun.
Brian:I think everyone who’s picked upHeist Kittyso far has been let’s go with Meowfia. That’s what the name sells, but going back and replaying the Purrlice will be a rewarding experience.
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Q: Could you tell us more about the cat heists and how they work compared to otherheist or crime video games, likeGTA?
Brian:You can clearly tell thatGTAhas an influence on the work that we’ve done in this particular rendition of the cat game series. But we really wanted to make this fun, humorous, and as kid-friendly as possible, while still kind of sticking to the spirit of the heist concept.
So there’s going to be a lot of differences there right off the bat. A lot of our stories and quest lines are all about rewarding the characters and setting up the payoff for a joke later on. This thing is fraught with cat puns, fraught with cultural references. If people don’t like puns, it’s not going to sit as well with them, but a lot of folks come back, and we do cat puns in our sleep now. We really want to try to make it fun.
There are obstacle courses. Again, a lot of influence from our kids who playMinecraftandRobloxandFortniteand all the other things, so it’s probably a little bit more dynamic and cartoony. A lot more interactive with the world as well.
Carmen:Yeah, you get into that world. You can turn on lights, turn off lights, turn on the water, mess with things, and knock things down as a cat. We know people love to just kind of be a cat for a little bit. The storyline really just takes you into parts where you’re trying to break in to get things, you’re trying to retrieve things, and you’re going to fight bad guys.
Brian:But not a lot ofGTAmissions have you jumping through cat cannons and landing on trampolines, swinging through the air, and riding platforms. There’s a bit more of aplatformer experiencethere.
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Q: Can you tell us a bit more about the bad guys or is it more of a secret?
Carmen: We have dungeon levels and different bosses that you will see. They are kind of similar, I don’t want to give that away, but it is a lot of fun. You go in there, and you can kind of have a formula setup where you get either more health or more mana. That mana will help charge up your weapons.
You also get a new weapon while you’re in there, so it kind of helps build your XP, get your weapons upgraded, that kind of thing. As players move along, they can fight some of those bad guys. You’ll have mobs and bad guys that are kind of lower level, and then you have your boss. I don’t want to give anything away about the bosses because they’re really awesome [laughs].
Brian: We’ll start off with a little bit of the story. So early on you start working for Mayor Mittens, she’s got you running around town. There’s a new company that’s come to town called Cetco Toys. They’re very mysterious. They’re doing some things that she’s not really okay with. So early on in the game, you go in and find out who’s behind Catco Toys, and then it just kind of snowballs from there into insanity.
Q:Apart from heists, what other ways might players become the ultimate cat nuisance and what consequences might there be?
Brian: So, we’ve got a couple of systems. We want to reward any kind of play a player wants to play. We’ve got a chaos system. You get points for knocking over groceries, knocking things off of walls, or playing in the arcade, for instance, and scoring points there. You can go into the mall and buy a hat from the Mad Cat, depending on how many points you’ve scored in chaos.
There’s also a harmony system. So if you play well with others, you can buy cats or hats from Harmony which sells positive cat hats. So again, we really want to reward any kind of play a player really wants to get into.
But the chaos system is kind of designed to snowball. So, you can go into a grocery store and completely trash the place and have fun doing that as well, and the other thing is we try to make as much of the world as possible interactable in interesting ways. You know, a cuckoo clock is going to act differently when you knock it off the table than a lamp is, turn water on and off flush toilets, and all kinds of crazy chaos that we’ve observed our cats trying to do from time to time.
But one thing you can’t do in this game is open a door [laughs], which our cats try so hard and cannot accomplish. That is a very interesting barrier, but you can climb everything right on top and vehicles. It’s just really meant to be, anytime you want to go away from the story and have just a fun house experience, it’s right there for you.
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Carmen: Yeah we have a lot of side quests, for you to go and explore the world even more. Even if you don’t use those side quests and you just tried to just venture off on the map, we like to leave Easter Eggs for you. So we’d like to reward the Explorer for trying to get someplace that most people might not typically think about going [laughs].
Brian: We know players like to break out of maps. We’ve got a button on the main menu that returns you to the start if you ever wind up getting yourself launched off the map [laughs]. I’ve played a lot of AAA games and players have managed to do that there, so we’re not going to think we can contain them, we just want to enable them.
Q: Or someone will deliberately try to see if they can do it, right?
Brian:Oh yeah! If you time your jumps on the trampoline, you’ll jump about 20% higher every time you hit it. So people have been up into space on these trampolines, and that is just kind of that emergent gameplay.
There are some things that we discovered about our game that we certainly left in after we figured it out. Our favorite bug that’s specific toHeist Kittyis when you drive your car in the wrong place or get stuck on something, it’s hard to get it off. So we added a jump feature - you hit jump and then the car will kind of boost a little bit. But if you spam that, you can in the right cases make the car fly across the map. I don’t how many people reported this as a bug but said please don’t take it out, including our kids. So that feature is still there.
One of the other ones - people don’t really know this to begin with - but you’re able to control people. If you just jump on them and grab on, you can make them do what you want. We created thisisland map, and humans aren’t damaged by the water but the cats are. People learned they can take humans and use them as boats to get across the map. Well, that’s novel. So we went in and added swimming animations for those people so that it would work in the game, and now you have human life rafts.
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Q: Leading on from that, could you tell us more about the cat traversal mechanics, like climbing, using cannons,driving in cars, and even RC cars?
Brian:I think we did touch on a lot of the big ones, but the one that we didn’t mention yet you learn in the police. You pick up a drone, and you can use that drone to control that remotely as well. Many of the enemies even can be controlled, so we tried to create as many ways to move across the map as there are in games. We don’t have grappling hooks, that’s kind of a hard thing to implement, but it’s not off the table.
Carmen:you’re able to hop on, and you can pretty much run that person wherever you want because they usually move faster than the cats. You can also use them as shields, the bad guys. I’ve done that before playing it. So I mean, there are a lot of things that you can use technique-wise with the cats and that’s a lot of fun. The cars - I think they’re just they’re a lot of fun to drive around. We’ve been really working hard on getting those. We have a radio in the cars, we can change the channel. Yeah, so you can really feel like you’re in the car just driving around as a cat.
Brian:Other cats can pile on top of the car, so you can drive with your whole party down the road. We did have another interesting bug that our son discovered that we also left in.
So early on, you get what’s called the force beam, which lets you pick up random items and carry them across the map. There are some items that are big enough for you to pick them up and also stand on them, and my son learned to kind of surf through the air with this giant fish and force beam. That’s definitely staying in the game. So, there are ways to transverse the map that we don’t even know about yet. Because of all the emergent gameplay that we tried to create with these items.
Q:How many lives do cats have, and how would you say the cat physics compare to sandboxgames likeGoat Simulator?
Brian: It’s a very good question. A lot of people say ‘well, you should start with nine lives.’ You will be able to pick up nine hearts - you have three hearts, to begin with. So we’re veryZelda-inspired, and you’re able to find new hearts along the way to get up to nine. We thought about limiting the number of lives before you had to start over to get some sort of Rogue-like, but we want to just be kid-friendly, so you get as many lives as you need.
You restart back at the beginning of the level if you pass away as a cat, and when you do, you turn into a little angel ghost cat and fly back to the beginning of the level. We do want to honor the concept of nine lives, but we certainly want to make it a little bit less hardcore. We may have a hardcore mode where you’re limited to nine lives, and you have to restart your cat.
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One of the other factors that we throw in there is we start with six default cats, and then you have the cat creator where you can make your own cat. But the six defaults all have different elemental alignments. So, when you go through the different dungeons – say dungeons, one’s a bank, one’s a shipyard - and you pick up your item, it’s a different item for every cat. So each cat has their own specialty.
So Midnight gets a sniper rifle. Tiger, he’s got this beast mode where he Hulks out into a giant cat. That one also has a fun side effect bug. If you’re close enough to someone else, you also turn them into a giant cat, including NPCs. We really did have a lot of fun making the items and weapons for each of the cats.
Carmen:You can tell that some of our bugs become some of our best features.
Q: What do you think cat lovers will enjoy the most aboutplaying as a catcausing ‘catastrophe’?
Carmen:I think they just enjoy going in there messing around in the world, interacting with it. We also have the ability where the cats can purr, and growl. We have our emotes, so I know a lot of them love that.
Brian:The emotes and animations really trigger a lot of folks, and they find those in the first part of the game. The cat for instance, if you let it sit long enough, it will start to clean itself and then take a nap and all these other little cat-like things that people really enjoy. Some cat lovers really do enjoy the bad side of being a cat causing chaos, angering people, and getting chased around. They seem to enjoy that part too. So, it all just depends on the person.
Yeah, you be a good or a bad cat.
Carmen:And I think people are going to really love the cat creator too as well because it opens up where you can create it to look exactly the way you want it to look. And then that cat will take on - it’s at random - but it’ll take on one of the elements that the other standardized cats have. So you don’t know until you unlock the first weapon.
Brian: Yeah, and there are a lot of things you can do with the cat creator. We’ve seen in some of the closed tests a lot of adorable abominations.
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Q:Could you tell us Kitty’sco-op multiplayer elementsand how playing solo compares?
Carmen:I think solo is more if you’re really interested in the story of it. Like you really want to just do the story want to know all that’s going on in the game, and figure out how it ends.
With multiplayer, I feel like it’s more of just causing a lot of chaos. You go through the storyline, you go through the dungeons, but it’s fun because you may depend on another character’s powers to use. Such as Angel, who is like our medic, she’s the healer. Some of her weapons will help heal the other players, they all have some really good weapons to kind of help out, so it makes it fun, entertaining, and social.
Brian: Yeah, one of the challenges we ran into was figuring out how to let people play at their own pace, drop in drop out of someone else’s game. Maybe someone’s been playing for the last four hours, and then you join them, so how do you get caught up? So really, the story progression is designed to work at an individual pace.
But there’s a reward system. If you’re further along but another player is trying to get caught up in the story, you’re nearby them providing support, then you get those harmony points we mentioned earlier, whenever they make progress in the game, which you can then use to go to a special shop and buy hats just associated with that.
Carmen: I do want to clear up about the hats. The hats actually help you in some way. They may allow you to have a little bit more armor, so you won’t get damaged as much, or you’re able to be faster, just different things like that will be added by the hat. So it gives the player a benefit when they’re wearing it.
Brian:Yeah, for instance, there’s a divers hat that you can buy in the Harmony shop that lets you not take damage when you’re in the water, which is going to be totally game-breaking.
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Q: You mentioned briefly about the Easter Eggs, finding new areas, that kind of thing. What other kinds ofEaster eggs might players come across in the game,likeThe Matrixmovie-style shades kittyand mad cat inventor Nic Tailsla as a play on Nikola Tesla?
Brian:Just about every character in the game, we tried to make a pun of some sort. Some sort of cultural reference or cat joke, we’re terrible about this, sorry. We really did attempt to keep the dialogue light and entertaining throughout the whole story.
There are also cases in there will you’ll meet cats from our previous games. You’ll find Meowfoy, who is one of the bad guys inCat Gets Medieval. He’s kind of squirreled away in an Easter egg point in the game and in a cage somewhere. He’s a little mad and just makes some jokes and references to the world there.
But we’ve got a lot of cultural references. We tried to find places where people tried to get into what they weren’t supposed to and then add a little nod to that success when they get there. A little note, little items that, you know, cats are hidden away. But there are some that are just obviously direct cultural references. Some of the items are more obscure too, but we tried to paint every corner of this game with something rewarding.
We certainly can’t anticipate where people are going to figure out how tobreak the game. One of the things we love to do, and we’ve done with our other games, we’ll watch all the Twitch streams. And whenever someone does something, finds themselves in a place that we didn’t think to reward, we’re going to go back and patch that in - okay, the next person is going to run into something there.
Like if you managed to launch yourself outside of town into this corner, then you might find a goblin camping in a tent somewhere. I think that’s one of the things we put in there or like Easter eggs, for instance, there are cannons here and there’s a chicken over on the beach, and you managed to hit the chicken with a cannon, you get a Steam achievement. So those are the kinds of things that we really are putting into, and we’ll keep putting into the game.
Carmen:Some of them could just be like more mana or health because we only have so much that we hand out in those dungeons. So, it could be an extra bear, it could be even an item of some sort that we put in there. It’s always a nice little surprise and like ooh I get something extra.
Brian:Or at least a joke right?
Carmen:Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
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Q:How doesHeist Kittycompare to other cat simulationgames likeStray, and what do you think makesHeist Kittyunique?
Carmen: I think it’s unique because it’s more open world,Heist Kittyis. You can go interact with it whereasStrayit’s more point-and-click, but I mean, it’s a bit similar in a way I guess. But it’s more open world. You have more areas to just kind of explore. You could decide to go to a different map and explore it without being led there by a story.
Brian:Yeah, and you’re going see parallels and inspiration from all kinds of other games. As I mentioned, we haveinspiration fromLegend of Zeldaand gadgets that help you move the story forward. We have inspirations fromGoat Simulator– being insane and crazy and that sort of thing. Or games likeHuman Fall Flator whatever where there’s puzzle progression.
I thinkStrayis an amazing game, visually beautiful, and fun to play. But it’s certainly kind of on rails, single-player kind of experience. And we wanted to enable players to break that we have rules, we have a story, you can certainly play by that, and a lot of people do. But we wanted folks to be able to say, I am not interested in your story. I want to call it some chaos or something completely different and come back to this later and be totally fine with that. And we created the biggest world we could for them to have that experience.
Q: Are you able to say what plans you might have for the future ofHeist Kitty, such as DLC or cross-play support, or things you would like to maybe appear in the future?
Silcock:We can reveal a little bit of the milestones for post-launch. We do plan to add some more content. We’ve got some racetracks and stuff that we’re putting in. We’re also going to be taking some suggestions from our community as well.
So right now, we’ve built such a nice core community. We’ve launched our alpha test this week. So we’re growing that as well, taking lots of comments and feedback and suggestions from our players which we hope to put in after post-launch, and potentially looking at consoles for cross-play, but haven’t made a decision on that quite yet. We’ll see how our launch goes.
Great – thank you for sharing that.
Brian: And the entire cat game series that we worked on all exists in the same universe, in the same timeline. So the end of this story, which is a twist I’m not going to give away, is the introduction to the next game we have in our series. So we have a lot of ideas that are interconnected.
We started working on a game with our kids calledCats Go Westjust to teach them how to write some games with a little side game there as well. We really want to build a community with our players from our previous games that really enjoy how we play this and get their feedback and what they want us to see. So yeah, this is really adaptable. And we’ve certainly enjoyed expanding the world.
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If players really fall in love with this, I’ve got some designs for procedural world generation for just things like chaos and that sort of thing. So we’ll see how it goes. But I really am looking forward to the racing theme. VeryFast and Furious-inspired. We were going to call it Fast and Fur-rious, but that was a little too on the nose. But yeah, veryFast and Furious-inspired - Dom Tortie I think the form of contact for learning. So that’s coming around the corner.
Q: What are you most excited for players to experience inHeist Kittywhen the game launches?
Carmen:I would say, I will be interested to see how they like the cat creator, and our maps for racing cars, because they are a lot of fun. And I can’t wait for us to be able to release that as well. But just getting in there exploring the world, and seeing what they think about it.
Brian: We really love when they get delighted, when they’re surprised by something that they didn’t expect to happen that would, or you know, this will never, explode in the way I’m expecting and it does. Whenever a player is delighted, the game is more than they bargained for, that really just thrills us. And we try to create that in every corner where we can.
Carmen: And we like to see what features people really are more drawn to and then we kind of build on that.
Q: Is there anything else that you’d like to add today?
Brian:I will say that there’s the best comment on our previous gameCat Gets Medievalthat we’ve got. There was a player that was streaming it, and they got to the end of the first castle and then realized that there were 30 other levels in the world – it’s amassive expansive world- and they said, “I thought this was going to be the end of the game, but it’s just the end of the tutorial”. And just to see them we kind of delighted about the fact that they got so much more than they bargained for, so much more than they felt they were paying for it. That was a big thing for us, and we’re trying to create that in every game we do.
Q: Lastly, I was intrigued to hear a bit more about what kinds of things fromZeldainspired the game?
Brian:Well, you’ll see right off the bat, you’ve got a heart meter, you’ve got a mana meter. So obviously in the UI, there’s that basic experience on how that works. A very kind of out-of-place magical experience.
But one of the things thatZelda’s always done well is take the progression you’ve made so far in the game and make it an asset, or maybe even a barrier to moving forward. For instance, we’ve got the force beam that I mentioned earlier, or fishing poles that you get the items that you collect, kind of advance you forward, and you learn how to use those in new ways to progress the gameplay and create new experiences as the game unfolds. So we really, really appreciate that and the sense of wonder, the creativity, and the mobs and the bosses that you fight. And I grew up back in the day whenthe firstZeldacame out on console.
So, I guess you could say there’s a little bit of an influence for all the original console games, there’s a lot of platforming in there, too. So you can giveMariocredit for that if you want. But we just really do love that sense of wonder that fantasy creates. So it influences us I’ll say.
Carmen:Yeah, it does. And I think also, another big influence is just with our family, going back to the family. We like to play games together. And so us being able to get on there and enjoy it. And if we can enjoy it as a family and have a great time, then we feel like anybody else could enjoy it just like we did.
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Heist Kitty: Cats Go a Strayis due for release on PC on July 18, 2025.
