Complete puzzles with a ball of yarn in Wake the Cat on iOS

In the world of cats, there are few things as important as a big ball of yarn, and in Chillingo and Halfpixel's newest iOS release Wake the Cat, it will be your mission to reunite one really sleepy kitty with her favorite toy.

A contraption-based puzzle game, Wake the Cat sees you rolling a ball of yarn across the floor, interacting with objects like toy trains and slippers, while avoiding many others including boxes of clutter, tools and more. As with most iOS puzzle games, Wake the Cat starts simply, with puzzles that may ask you to simply time your roll to miss a moving object, while later levels become incredibly complex, requiring more than just passive observation as you must continue to interact with objects even while the ball of yarn is rolling.

In the case of curved pipes, for instance, you may need to rotate the pipe to send the ball of yarn around a corner and into a slipper (which serves as a portal to another area of a level), only to rotate that pipe to catch the ball of yarn again as it comes back around. The end goal of each level is to simply touch the cat with the ball of yarn to wake it up, and you'll earn up to three stars on a stage depending on the time it took for you to complete it, and the number of times you had to attempt to roll the ball through the stage.

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Like many puzzle games, Wake the Cat comes with its fair share of challenge, and some puzzles do initially seem too complicated to complete. In these cases, it's more a case of trial and error than real strategy, until everything "clicks." In other cases, you'll send the yarn across the screen on your first try, which we must admit is pretty satisfying. What's more, the graphics in Wake the Cat are simply precious, as this adorable kitten is nothing but a ball of fur that jumps up and down with the arrival of the yarn, and the rest of the 3D environments offer colorful objects that mark and light the way for the yarn.

With the object of Wake the Cat being so simple, we could see the game offering more long-term entertainment if tangible stars (or some other collectible) were added to each stage - some sort of item that we had to pick up before sending the yarn to the sleeping kitty. As it stands, many of the game's levels can be completed with a three star rating after only a handful of tries, and there's no real incentive to keep going back and retrying them once you solve their puzzles. Still, with 60 levels to complete and the promise of more coming in the future, Wake the Cat is a pretty great investment game for the future, and you can now download it for $0.99 on either iPhone or iPad.

Download Wake the Cat for $0.99 >

Have you tried Wake the Cat? What do you think of this newest physics / contraption puzzle game from Chillingo? Sound off in the comments!