Find Matt's Cats review: The cats are hiding, and so is your afternoon

Find Matt's Cats — original editorial title artwork; not official game artwork
Game RevsPublished · Updated

Find Matt's Cats has a title that sounds like a favour you could finish before lunch. Matt has misplaced some cats. You will locate them. Everyone will thank you, and then normal life will resume. Unfortunately, Matt appears to have lost them across a large collection of elaborate scenes containing thousands of other objects, several alternative ways to play, and a story about keeping a game studio together. This is not a favour. This is an unpaid secondment to the Department of Where Did That Go.

Matt Roszak's hidden-object game builds around the pleasure of looking closely, but it doesn't stop at presenting a drawing and waiting for you to point at the correct animal. Interactive scenery, varying objectives, optional visual gimmicks, and a development-themed narrative give the search more texture. Its strongest idea is that a scene can be both a puzzle and a place worth poking, even when the poking eventually becomes a suspiciously organised lifestyle.

Reasons to look closer

The appeal begins with hand-crafted levels that reward attention rather than reflexes. You're learning how a particular image organises its clutter: where objects might blend in, what can be opened, and which details deserve a second glance. A good hidden-object scene makes the answer feel obvious immediately after you find it, which is a very polite way of allowing a drawing to insult you.

Different difficulty modes change the goals, so revisiting a scene isn't necessarily just repeating the same shopping list from memory. Spot-the-difference challenges add another kind of looking, asking you to compare rather than simply search. Together, those structures offer a reasonable answer to the genre's obvious problem: once you've found the cat, it usually remains found. The game gives your eyes other jobs before they form a union.

Find Matt's Cats launched for Windows on March 16, 2026. It's a pleasantly direct invitation to take your time with a colourful collection of busy scenes. The difficult part is remembering that you originally sat down to do something else, preferably before the missing cats start charging rent in your brain.

Four friends, many distractions

The story concerns four friends trying to keep their video-game studio together. That framing makes the work you're doing feel like part of the characters' project, rather than an unrelated activity interrupting their conversations. It also leaves room for jokes about the business of building something full of tiny details that other people will immediately discover you've positioned incorrectly.

The connection to Roszak's existing characters gives returning fans something extra, but the premise is understandable without a lore qualification. A group of people are making a game and trying to remain a functional group of people. Those objectives are not always naturally compatible. Hidden-object play is an especially apt companion to that story because development itself involves noticing the one thing that shouldn't be there among several thousand things that probably should.

The game's occasional darker humour is disabled by default. That is a sensible choice for a colourful search game whose audience might include people playing alongside children. Cute artwork can be an invitation, not a binding promise about every joke inside it, so giving players a clear setting is more useful than hoping everyone has arrived with identical expectations.

Difficulty isn't just making the cat smaller

The version-two update adds fourteen levels across two worlds, bringing the current set to 98, and introduces a fourth difficulty setting called Simple. This mode uses a shorter goal list and requires fewer interactions, while still becoming more demanding as it progresses. It changes the nature of the search rather than simply issuing an enormous magnifying glass and calling the problem solved.

That's valuable because hidden-object games can ask several different things of a player. Recognising a shape, remembering a location, and discovering that a building opens are related skills, but they aren't the same skill. Reducing some of those demands can make a shared session easier to follow, or turn a tired evening into something pleasant rather than a confrontation with decorative foliage.

The update also adds more unlockable cursors and filters, artwork for the gallery, and dialogue. Those extras make a useful second layer of rewards, especially for people who enjoy customising the way they interact with a game. They are not a substitute for interesting scenes, but they give continued searching a few more destinations. Finding a missing object is good. Finding enough missing objects to acquire a sillier pointing device is an entire motivational theory.

Look carefully, and choose your own amount of nonsense

The scale is both the attraction and the potential limit. If you love searching busy pictures, a large set of scenes with alternate goals is a generous invitation. If the basic activity feels like being asked to locate a receipt in somebody else's kitchen drawer, more content won't suddenly make that drawer your hobby. This is a game for people who enjoy the looking itself, not merely the moment when looking is finally over.

The optional goals and modes are important precisely because this is such a personal kind of pastime. Some people want to clear every objective, while others are happy finding a few things before dinner. A scene can be worth visiting without becoming an obligation to squeeze every last hidden trinket out of it. The cats do not need a quarterly report. They would sit on it anyway.

Find Matt's Cats looks most appealing as a leisurely, flexible scavenger hunt with enough personality to make its clutter feel intentional. The different goals, growing level set, and small creative rewards give it more range than the title's simple errand suggests. Come for a few missing felines; stay because you have developed a personal dispute with a suspiciously ordinary-looking bush. Matt can wait. That bush knows something.

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