Cat Detective Albert Wilde Review
Albert Wilde is on the case to solve a quantum mystery in Beyondthosehills’ hard-boiled detective parody.
Cat Detective Albert Wilde. Credit: Beyondthosehills
Film noir doesn’t refer to a genre; it’s a visual style. Dark shadows dominate the frame, creating high contrast with lit areas. Off-kilter compositions with frequent low angles, frequently in deep focus. Urban settings, often at night. Though not a genre, the style is most famous for its use in crime and hard-boiled detective films of the 1940s and 1950s, filled with mystery, tension, and moral ambiguity. Cat Detective Albert Wilde from developer Beyondthosehills is a comedy narrative game that skewers these genres, deftly using their familiar tropes in its story, dialogue, and mostly faithful visual style.
Albert Wilde is a broke private investigator with no clients. He’s a humanoid cat, living in a reality where everyone is an animal person. When a strange four-legged dead body is found with a face remarkably like Albert’s, he gets on the case, hopeful for a reward so he can pay off the thousands he owes the moose bookie. Things get weird as it becomes apparent that the mystery is entangled with a quantum theory-obsessed cult and a certain famous cat-in-a-box thought experiment.
Cat Detective Albert Wilde. Credit: Beyondthosehills
The story is the main draw in the game. It’s a decent hard-boiled detective parody that amusingly plays with the genre's tropes. For example, Albert has a constant internal monologue, spoken in a deep, gruff voice, but it’s not just a narrative device; characters constantly tell Albert to stop monologuing because, in reality, he’s just staring into space whenever we hear the internal voice. The writing is funny. I just wish they didn’t repeat some of the jokes—Albert constantly talks about licking his own butthole, as we know that's how cats clean themselves. It’s funny—once. Not three or four times.
Most of the game is in first-person, except for cutscenes and certain dialogue segments. Players explore locations with typical first-person controls, looking for points of interaction that are helpfully highlighted by yellow dots. Most of these just provide information or move the story forward; very few puzzles interrupt the narrative. This is more of a visual novel than an adventure game, and that’s fine.
Most of Cat Detective Albert Wilde is presented in black and white, in a 4:3 aspect ratio with a heavy film grain filter. The filter is a little too much and not period-appropriate, making the picture look older than the noir films the game references. Otherwise, the game mostly nails the visual style, although I sometimes wished the shadows were more stark. The camera also employs a narrow depth of field, refocusing depending on how far into the background the objects in the center of the frame are located; this isn’t usually characteristic of noir, and it also was a bit distracting during first-person exploration. Most settings in the game look good and have a nice amount of detail; however, the character models leave a bit to be desired and have some rough animations.
The sound in the game was hilarious. While Albert’s internal voice is pitch-perfect, all the characters actually make animal sounds when they speak, and it never gets old.
Cat Detective Albert Wilde. Credit: Beyondthosehills
It’s impossible not to compare Cat Detective with The Wild Gentlemen’s excellent Chicken Police games. The writing style is different, as is the gameplay; Chicken Police is more of an adventure game mechanically. Chicken Police has some funny bits, but it’s mostly played straight, unlike Cat Detective, a parody that doesn’t take itself seriously. Both are worth playing if you’re a fan of the genre. However, the Chicken Police games are far more polished.
Albert’s total idiocy is endearing, as are all the supporting characters who barely tolerate him. The game leaves off at a point where I could easily see one or more sequels in greatly expanded settings, and I hope we get to solve more mysteries with the cat detective in the future in games that are a little less rough around the edges.
Cat Detective Albert Wilde is available now on Steam. You can also check out a demo.
Overall Score: 6/10
Played on: Steam Deck
