Fat. Round. Cat.

you have to rotate the camera to facilitate movement, so the game makes me a little motion-sick

fun game, other than that.

Omg so nostalgic

Peaceful game make me calm down and rethink why should I feel furious about some weird things or some stupid guys.

good game

It's LocoRoco?
First of all, I obviously have to compare it to LocoRoco. It takes its biggest inspiration from it and its base gameplay is the same. The art style is beautiful and gives it its own identity. Their biggest additions to the base principle of LocoRoco are the cute characters with short but charming dialogues and the "Catstagram", a screenshot implementation that posts the picture on the ingame, artificial social media "Catstagram". That just means, if you trigger the screenshot at an interesting point (e. g. near a character), there's a polaroid of the picture and a few funny/cute hashtags popping up. Not really a deep gameplay addition but enough to make you smile every time.

The Meh
Jumping just doesn't feel that great overall. Jumping does not feel like jumping but like the character gets kicked up by the world. This was acutally the case for LocoRoco too, where you actually shook the world and by that got your blob to jump (afaik), but the world in The Big Journey doesn't shake and the "jump" does just not feel like there was any force behind it. The cat just floats up.
The next thing is controller problems. It supports dInput directly which is nice. But it isn't nice that some inputs just randomly get recognized multiple times. Like when I made a screenshot, the polaroid popping up sometimes instantly got closed/put away again because it registered a second button press. This is caused by Steam Input. So if you have a Dualsense controller, DISABLE STEAM INPUT FOR THIS GAME! Even with native dInput, using the stick in the main menu is still strange and just doesn't work as expected. The ingame menu doesn't seem to work at all with dInput.

The Very Great
The OST. Sorry for mentioning LocoRoco again but it's an absolute must if we talk about the OST now. LocoRoco had great music. I mean GREAT. Simply upbeat and just made to bring pure joy to the people the moment they listen to it. It simply cannot be beaten. And this was probably my biggest fear when approaching this game. That I'd just miss the LocoRoco music while playing. Buuuuuut… this is not the case. The Big Journey has a great OST too. Not too many tracks but probably proportional to the length of the game it's percentually the same amount. While I don't listen to it in my spare time (as I do with LR's one. I just can't stop praising it, can I?), I still enjoyed every single second of the OST while playing The Big Journey.

I played it through in under 5 hours with getting all three "stars" in all levels. It doesn't ask for much money, so the lenght is in no way a problem. You can't expect the same quanity of content or the same amount of polishing as in a game by Japan Studios. But it's still a charming, cute and fun platformer as its own and I can safely encourage you to buy it :)


Or should I say ":3"?

I rate The Big Journey 3/5. OK. This is an extremely cute, platformer styled, side-scrolling adventure game which appears to be a loose imitation of LocoRoco except with a focus on really, really cute cats. Unfortunately, while extremely cute, The Big Journey isn’t nearly as inventive as LocoRoco, its music isn’t as good and its loose, somewhat unresponsive controls cause it to be frustrating and repetitive in places. As a little bit of this game goes a long way, I found it best to play it in short bursts. Even so, The Big Journey is a fairly short game, taking me just over 2 hours to play through all the main levels (though it does have much harder, frustrating bonus “Wonderland” levels, most of which I have not yet played). Even though it’s only 5 USD, if you get this game, get it during a special steam sale…and, like me, you better really, really, REALLY like cute cartoon cats.

+ Extremely cute artistic cartoon style throughout. Even the insects are really cute. The sum-total cuteness is what makes this game worthwhile.

+/- The music is okay but it could have been better. There were several melodies which could have been developed far more but weren’t.

- The controls can be difficult. They feel soft and floaty, well suited to the furry cat-ball you control but this also causes the controls to lack precision. It’s best to play this game with an extremely laid-back attitude.

- Very nonsensical story with only a single disappointing, irritating ending, severely lacking in emotional CATharsis.

- As you progress through each level you can get items to make your character slightly bigger but doing so doesn’t seem to drastically change how the game handles or plays.

- Given how truly cute this game’s artistry is, I’d like to see more steam profile backgrounds, emoticons, chat animations, etc. to go with this game. Currently it has none of this extra stuff.

My daughter Loves it, wonderful colors, nice mechanics, and brilliant atmosphere.

rolling cat!

it is fun and relaxing nice and easy to play.