Catto Boi is an indie videogame series made by Mango-Ki on itch.io, focusing on a little angry cat known as Catto Boi, finding and collecting lost objects for his friends on the little island that they live in...
Across all of the games, every time the player reaches what would normally be the last level, something happens. A new level appears and eventually the player realizes... there is something inside the game, and it wants nothing but to bring torment to the little cat and the player controlling him.
The series started out as a submission for the Luigikid.EXE Creepypasta Challenge, before later on turning into a saga of several games.
Later on, on 2023, the series was rebooted into a better experience than before, with all of the original installments of the series being deleted from the internet.
The games provide examples of:
- Adaptational Attractiveness: In the non-canon spin-off Trouble In Love Land, Catto Boi and Big Boi are drawn far fluffier and cuter than before, mostly thanks to the Art Shift.
- Adaptational Badass: Zigzagged. In the old games, Catto was never capable of anything more than just jumping around really well, until very late into the games where he became capable of attacking with his claws, but in the new ones, he has a whole moveset of various physical attacks including claw attacks, uppercuts and even flying kicks capable of easily destroying boulders and crates. Despite this however, in the old version of Quest For The Frozen Tuna, when he turned out to be a phasing entity like Minori, he was treated as powerful enough to easily overpower Entity with Minori's aid to allow the player to delete him from the game, while in the new version of it, all he gained was self-awareness, and only defeated Malice because he was weakened by the deletion of his hook file, which made him capable of being defeated and destroyed by Catto's bare paws
- Aerith and Bob: We have names for characters like Catto Boi, Big Boi, Hissy Boi, Floaty Boi, Melty Boi, etc, and then we have names like Bob, Cheese, Violet and Minori.
- Ambiguous Innocence: Minori, in the new games, at least. Given the fact that, at one point, Malice vaguely alludes to her having taken everything from him, with Catto's games being the only thing he has now. And the fact that she's always been supposed to be a code-warping entity just like him doesn't help either...
- Big Bad: The phasing entity responsible for the corruption of the games, Malice
- Cats Have Nine Lives:
- Across most of the games, Catto has 9 extra lives.
- The quote is referenced in one of the game's loading screens, saying "Cats have 9 lives, you don't.".
- Collect-a-Thon Platformer: Every single one of the games (with the exception of Trouble In Love Land) are a 2D version of this, with Catto having to go around the levels, exploring to find and collect a certain number of objects (such as biscuits, pearls, gems, etc) to be able to advance to the next levels.
- Cute Kitten: Almost all of the game's cast is comprised of cats and all of them are pretty adorable, specially Catto Boi himself.
- Dark Is Not Evil: Minori, who is a black cat and all she does is help out Catto and the player.
- Disguised Horror Story: The games appear to be a fun and colorful platformer at first, until the corruptions start to happen.
- Ghost Town: In the 3rd game during one part, Catto finds himself wandering around the town, where everything is completely empty, with the implication that everybody there is dead.
- Grave Robbing: In the 2nd game, as a way of twisting the usual formula of object collection in the games, one of the levels warped by the entity puts Catto on a cementery where he has to go collecting skeletons from their graves to advance to the next level.
- Named by the Adaptation: In the old games, the entity was just called Entity, but now in the reboot, it has been given an actual name Malice.
- Ominous Visual Glitch: These appear all across the games to mark the corrupting presence of the Entity.
- Red and Black and Evil All Over: Almost everything related to the Entity is black and red, from the backgrounds warped by it, to the horrors it creates to torment Catto, to even its own form.
- Shout-Out:
- In several occasions, the quote "Never give Catto up" is used on the loading screens.
- The 2nd installment of the old games (the one now called "Catto Boi's Tedious Pearl Hunt") is called Catto Boi's Bizarre Adventure and uses an 8-bit cover of Battle Tendency's opening for its title screen.
- In Trouble In Love Land, Catto starts playing Never Gonna Give You Up on a boombox as a joke for the player.
- The Jojo references don't seem to stop on the current games either, as "Quest For The Frozen Tuna" ends with the quote "The conclusion will be reached... in Requiem"
- Taunt Button: In some of the games, Catto can meow with SHIFT. It serves no purpose but being cute.
- Subverted Kids' Show: Initially presented as a normal platformer about a cute little cat in a Sugar Bowl world, collecting objects for his friends, it later turns out the games are all corrupted by a mysterious self-aware entity that torments Catto and the player for sadistic pleasure.
- Sugar Bowl: The island where Catto and his friends live is a bright, colourful place full of varied and very lively landscapes. These are, of course, all warped into horrifying hellscapes whenever stuff goes to hell.
