The Babble Bruh Reviews

Feeling Suicidal and Depressed? It’s Not You, It’s Just the Maggot Queen Being a Huge Bitch Again

The Cat Lady is a very cool and creepy point-and-click horror story from 2012. As the second game in the “Devil Came Through Here” trilogy, we’re treated to a simple yet dark adventure exploring what it’s like to try and live a normal life in Europe. Naturally, this means we start the game with a suicide note as our main character, Susan, downs a whole bottle of sleeping pills in front of her cats. Nothing too out of the ordinary there, I know. But what turns this normal English-Monday into an American-Friday is when Susan wakes up to find not the pain-free paradise she was hoping for, but a strange cabin with an even stranger inhabitant. Inside is a very creepy old woman—or more likely, a demonic entity—calling herself the Queen of Maggots, who tells Susan quite simply that she’s not allowed to die. In fact, she curses Susan with immortality, and if Susan wants to die so badly, she needs to do what this bag of bones wants. And what could she possibly want from a middle-aged, depressed cat lady, you ask? Well, she just wants Susan to go kill five serial killers.

Our dear Susan then wakes up in a hospital, being told she’s a miracle case. The amount of sleeping pills she took should have killed an elephant, yet she awakens unharmed. The quest has started, and you’ve been warned: the last thing you were told by your benefactor was that you’ll know when you’ve found your prey because they will have already found you first.

I love the story of this game. Susan Ashworth is a victim of depression who’s inadvertently found a monkey’s paw. In wishing for death, she gets exactly what she wants—in spades. She’s going to be hunted and murdered by serial killers over and over again until she becomes one herself. With each chapter, you’ll navigate a period in Susan’s life and see how she deals with one of her ambushers, typically starting with her being ambushed and/or killed by one of her targets. When Susan dies, she enters the spirit world and has to solve a puzzle or two to wake back up in the real world, where she’ll be good as new until the next attack. This becomes an even more vital tool later when the killers attack her but don’t kill her. In one instance, she’s blinded with bleach and has to scramble in the dark until she can find a means to kill herself and wake up fresh. It’s a dark, intense, and surprisingly awesome story, especially when you finally get the advantage on these deranged freaks and can dish out that sweet, sweet justice.

The plot involves quite a few colorful characters outside of the bizarre serial killers, and you’ll get some interesting choices in how Susan interacts with them. Will you be a nice Cat Lady who wants to make friends after years of solitude? Or will you dig back into your old hermit roots and push them away with rage and bitterness? That’ll be between you, the army of stray cats that visit Susan’s flat, and the questionably evil Queen of Maggots who sent you on this journey in the first place.

The story starts with Susan at absolute rock bottom, and as the plot progresses, we go from craving death to fighting tooth and nail for life. It’s a very neat game that will take you 6-8 hours to beat, depending on how fast you go. It’s fully voiced by an amazing cast, and combined with the awesome art style, it makes for a fantastic bite-sized horror-adventure that leaves me wanting more. I would happily give this title 8 spooky clicks on the keyboard out of 10, and would recommend it to anyone who doesn’t mind playing a point-and-click game—though, to be fair, that audience is already very small.

Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoyed this babble.