Haru Cat Slide

This is a pretty simple Tetris-type puzzle where you have a series of rows that are 8 blocks wide, filled with cats that are 1, 2, 3 or 4 blocks wide.  You try to complete rows to make them go away, and a new row rises from the bottom.  I have seen the same game using cars and other themes, which did not interest me at all, but somehow, the same thing using cartoon cats and an occasional meow and I find it hard to put down.

The darn thing runs an ad after every game, and sometimes even before your first game of the night, so boo for that.  And they want $8.99 to hide ads, when I'm willing to pay maybe $3-5 which seems fair.  There are some cute characters and bonus actions, and some kind of storybook that I almost never look at.

As for strategy, it has just enough to think about.  It comes down to how many open spaces are on each line.  It there is only one open block, you won't be able to fill it if all the blocks above it are more than one block wide.  The longer cats will block the ones above them.  Sometimes you slide a cat to drop it down a level, and sometime you slide it out of the way so a cat above it can drop down.  Sometimes the cat you move and the one that falls into place can be several lines away so it's worth looking an extra second or two for the best move.

But eventually the screen fills and you get jammed at the top.  All app things come to an end.

There are maybe too many bonus cats.  Some will remove other cats at random when included in a filled line; the purple one will remove all cats touching it; sometimes the cats freeze and have to be matched twice before they leave, or get chained so they can't be moved at all.  Sometimes, the resolution of the match is chaotic enough that it's hard to focus on any kind of strategy.

It's a fun pasttime.  I run some levels every now and then, and my top score is 33200.

An update last week added some hilarious animations to the main menu page, so the developers are keeping some humor in it, which is always nice.