Catch Me!: the game of tag where you slam the window in your chaser's face

Easy to pick up and pure chaos with a full group, but show up alone and you get empty lobbies and a line-up of bots to run from.

Slamming the window on whoever is chasing you

To shake off whoever is on your tail in Catch Me!, you can climb onto a roof, crash out of a window with a running jump, or simply turn around and hurl a cat at your pursuer - no cat was harmed, the studio promises in its own description of the game. Small, faintly ridiculous ideas like that one carry the entire game: four players to a match, one runs, the other three hunt, and whoever gets caught becomes the next target.

The real character in every chase is the setting. Shut a window and you slow down the players behind you; open another and you have an escape route; electrocute someone and you buy a split second of lead. You can scramble over rooftops, ride Ferris wheels and surf on top of a subway train, and each of the game's six maps takes its cue from a different city somewhere in the world.

Between runs, the game invites you to put together a look of your own - skins, emojis and animations - so nobody in the group forgets who the fastest one is. The store itself files Catch Me! under action, casual and sport, and those tags explain the pacing: short matches, easy to read, built to be over quickly round after round.

An announcement that wasn't about the game

Work back over the announcements ByteRockers' Games has posted on the store and you find little recent news about the game itself: the meatiest post goes back to the end of Early Access, on 24 January 2023, when the studio - which handles development and publishing alike - listed the skins, maps, catch animations, emotes and events piled up over the testing period as proof that the project had grown enough to stand as a full release.

In a later post, the team acknowledged that the response to the game had been split - part of it positive, part of it not - and then went further, speaking out to answer accusations that developers had been sending abusive messages to players who left a negative review, and stating that a strict code of conduct holds inside the team. It is rare for a studio to have to account for its own behaviour rather than for its game.

Easy to learn, hard to make it last

You gather three people on the same call, drop into a match and a few minutes later you have the whole thing figured out: run, cut off a passage, shove someone out of a window. That easy way in is what comes back review after review - a light game that runs without fuss on a weak machine, with rounds that get a laugh out of you straight away.

One player who has reached 1025 hours still recommends it, while admitting that the execution never catches up with the promise of the idea: the longest text among the favourable ones is also the most hesitant. At the other end, someone with a single hour played calls the result merely average and doubts a group of friends would come back after a first go - the fun at the start is not the problem, what follows it is. A review written in Turkish describes the tension of the chases as the best its author has ever felt in a game, and sits in the same batch beside a player who praises the game but reports a server that is sometimes empty.

That same pairing - enthusiasm on one side, a caveat on the other - shows up all over the praise: people who recommend the game and, in the very next sentence, warn that it holds nobody for long. The party is real. It is just short.

A four-player game played alone

The most frequent complaint is not about the concept, but about what is left of it after the first hour. A French review, 9 hours in, sums it up well: good fun at the start, repetitive as soon as the novelty wears off. Some players report a new bug in every match, others grumble that certain achievements fail to register the action they ask for, even when it is repeated several times.

You feel the problem up close in mid-air or on a sloped platform: the movement seizes up at the exact moment it should be saving your escape, and that, more than the repetition, is what leads an English-language review to set Catch Me! against other platforming chase games that solve the same problem better. The most specific gripe, though, is about company: the game asks for four live people and often delivers empty rooms - bots fill the rest. A review from July 2026, explaining why its author does not recommend the game, points out that it has no local multiplayer either, the one format that would suit this sort of couch mayhem.

Even the harshest review grants it one good flash: for the short while it held up, the laughs were worth it.

For people who already have someone on the other end

Catch Me! delivers what it promises when you have three friends ready at the same time, on the same call, happy to laugh at slamming a window in each other's faces. That closed group, playing together, is where the game works: easy to explain, light to run, funny for as long as the group holds out.

Anyone dropping in alone for a quick match finds a different game - a lobby that is empty most of the time, an opponent who in practice tends to be a bot, and a chase that, with nobody real to shut the window from the other side, loses its charm far too fast. The hardest part here is not escaping your pursuer: it is finding one - and that leaves cats over, with nobody to throw them at.