Cat Named Mojave: the way out of the desert runs through a Cat Man's basement

A short, surreal horror game that means to unsettle you — and comes recommended for exactly that reason.

The deal with the Cat Man

A dead car battery strands you in the middle of the desert with no way out. Your only exit answers to the name Cat Man: charming, always watching you, and unstable enough that you never quite know where you stand. The bargain he offers is a short one — bring trophies down to his basement, and maybe he'll let you leave. The trophies are the surreal creatures that live out there, and the job doesn't end with the hunt: you have to skin them, cut them up, and store them away.

This is a first-person horror game built on simple, deliberate mechanics. The camera never demands quick reflexes, and the discomfort doesn't come from jump scares but from what the game puts in your hands. With every piece you deliver, the world around you opens up a little: hints of a near-dead desert where you seem to be one of the last humans left, dropped with just enough ambiguity for you to fill in the rest yourself. The gameplay never lets you forget what it's asking of you — reckoning with your own part in the story is part of the game.

The studio didn't drop the game after December

Stargazers Studios, the game's sole developer, didn't disappear once it shipped. In the months that followed, the team brought the horror game to PS5, got it verified on Steam Deck, and sat down with translators to add official support for Russian, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese, on top of swapping out fonts and clearing up text errors that got in the way of reading it in several languages. It's unglamorous behind-the-scenes work, but it says something: a small studio treating a short, already-finished game as a living thing, widening the pool of people who can play it instead of rushing off to the next one.

The people recommending it also admit it made them feel bad

The reception gathered on Steam is warm and uncomfortable at once. One person spent five hours, finished, and started over just to catch what they'd missed; they described the mood as a dry, heavy heat of constant uncertainty, glancing over their shoulder with every step. Another quit an hour in, recommended it anyway, and summed things up by saying they hated the whole experience — and thanked the studio for it. A third, two hours in, walked out of the desert carrying the game's questions instead of its answers, moved by the sad world they'd crossed.

The praise is almost never about fun. It's about tension: people who spent the game on tiptoe, who laughed out of nerves when the cat started dancing in the kitchen, who came away turning over the absurdity of lending human values to animals. The macabre humor walks hand in hand with the violence without softening either one. None of this comes from the store that's giving the game away: the people who wrote it are on its Steam page, and there the praise is all but unanimous among an audience that's still small.

The complaint that keeps coming up: it's too short

The criticism that recurs doesn't come from the people who hated the game but from the ones recommending it: it's short. One four-hour player reached the end wanting more — more world, more development, a less abrupt ending. It's the objection of someone who wanted to keep going, not someone with regrets. And then there's the deliberate discomfort: skinning and chopping up the creatures isn't decoration, it's the heart of the game. Anyone hoping the horror offers some consolation at the end won't find any.

For anyone with the stomach for it and a free afternoon

This is for anyone who wants a short, strange, grimy horror story — the kind that keeps gnawing at you hours after you've switched it off — and doesn't mind being complicit in what happens on screen. If watching an animal get skinned already turns your stomach, the first hunt settles the matter right there. If you measure a game by hours of campaign, the ending comes far too soon — the fans themselves asked for more. And if you're after light fun, the Cat Man doesn't live at your house. What he asks of you isn't reflexes or patience: it's holding the knife to the end and stomaching what it does.