This is a video game for those with strong opinions about physics. Are there many?
Regardless, Schrodinger's Cat could be a catalyst to accidentally re-animate edu-tainment software of the '90s, a perky British production with its brain wrapped around the famed quantum physics thought project: A cat is in a box, both dead and alive. That's the crux of physicist Erwin Schrodinger's famous quizzical paradox.
Developer Italic Pig thus dresses their aptly named kitty-with-an-attitude with half dark/half light purple tones representing each side of the debate. Chances are this cat knows the Periodic Table too. Every bit of it.
In pieces, Schrodinger's Cat is delightfully chaotic, and playful as it is, Schrodinger's Cat still questions our existence. Tracing steps through a Particle Zoo disaster, the many caretakers of this literal zoo of Bosons, Leptons, and others, seem oblivious to the mess before them. Such a game is willing to process how perplexed many are regarding their own sub-atomic reality. Guards to various exhibits read a newspaper as alarms blare. Others work only as hard as their minimum wage security job tells them to. It's an adorable poke at scientific naivety – religions need not apply. Exclamations of, “Holy Higgs!” firmly place Schrodinger's Cat on the side of human wisdom as opposed to higher powers.
Such jokey contempt for faith oozes from the British nationalism of Italic Pig, and paired with Worms creators Team17, Schrodinger's Cat is readily aware of its own scientific flattery. When confronted, the cat lashes out with sarcastic quips, all the while picking up loosed quarks, photons, and atoms. He uses his collected team of colored quarks to mount a small offense or navigate rooms. Quarks form platforms, destroy the ground, make parachutes, explode or whatever other intuitive creations are allowed. Therein lies the puzzle of this puzzle/platformer: How can these quarks be formed together to navigate the winding layouts of the zoo?
This physique is all Team17. Any of these sections, from a kind of/sort of hub world to cordoned off exhibit rooms, could be a level from Worms. They're random too, a rather illogical and obnoxious decision which robs Schrodinger's Cat of design muscle. Italic Pig claims this dodges the platformer's problem of replayability, ignoring decades of elegant, pre-designed Mario Bros. bliss. Clearly no one plays those plumber games anymore, right?
It's a solution without a problem. For the pocket protector level of braininess on display, such randomness is intellectually insincere. Squirmy and agile as the kitten may be, maneuvering through a screen of crowded, nonsensical pieces of floating land proves to be pace stopping. Levels feel obviously laid out by AI algorithms, not talented hands. If this is a statement on the volatility of the universe's construction, it is a failure.
And thus, all of Schrodinger's Cat is a bit of a bomb. Lively and exuberant about quantum theories as it can be, there is a lack of sustained momentum. Gameplay peaks, which are always a part of the closed down, tightly managed exhibition rooms, are a joy. They're also too brief. Schrodinger's Cat is screaming for some intensely linear focus – a hundred level, slightly old school video game instead of falling victim to the new school pitfalls of (mildly) open worlds. Collectibles and hidden items do not a great game make, yet therein lies the substance of Schrodinger's Cat.
That aside, even with his alliterative big mouth, Schrodinger's cat would make for a fine bar buddy. Better than Bubsy anyhow. He's smart, he's clever, he can't die (as much as we know). It is the world he inhabits which lets him down.
