Chasing Whiskers

A Grandma, A Portal, and a Suspicious Café Owner

Student games live in a weird pocket of Steam. Charm to burn, sometimes a real idea buried in there, and almost always a deadline that ate the polish phase alive. Chasing Whiskers — arriving on Steam in June 2026 — fits that mold. It's a 24-week cozy project out of Breda University of Applied Sciences in which you play a grandmother who chases her cat through an interdimensional portal and then ends up running errands for a sketchy café owner.

That premise is doing a lot of work. Good. It should.

What's Actually Going On Here

Chasing Whiskers comes from a team calling themselves Five High Cats, which tells you roughly 90% of what you need to know about the tone before you've watched a single second of footage. You spot cats. You dive. You scoop. Each one apparently has a unique ability, and that's where the design starts to hint at something more interesting than a flat collect-a-thon — though how deep that goes, who knows yet.

The structure is the oldest trick in the cozy-game book. A gatekeeper NPC — Ponpon, the café owner — will absolutely, definitely, this-time-for-sure tell you where your lost cat went, as soon as you do one more little thing for them. The studio leans into the joke in their own marketing, which is a small encouraging sign. They know the trope. They're winking at it. Whether the errand loop actually escapes feeling like a glorified fetch chain is the question every cozy game in this corner has to answer, and student projects rarely have the runway to answer it well.

The Unreal Look

From the environment showcase clips floating around, it's running in Unreal Engine 5, stylized and saturated, with a jungle-y palette — bright greens, exaggerated foliage, everything a bit soft around the edges. It's the visual register that's been working for cozy indies for a few years now, somewhere between Bugsnax and the lighter end of Animal Crossing. Not groundbreaking. Not trying to be.

The "Catworld" setting also quietly does the team a favor: it lets them shove weird cat-themed props into every corner without justifying any of it, which is a smart constraint for a small team. You can hide a lot of asset reuse behind absurdist set dressing.

What the Early Footage Tells You (and Doesn't)

The handful of clips circulating right now are mostly environment flyovers and short gameplay snippets from the team's own channels, plus a couple of smaller streamers picking it up. No real critical coverage yet. No extended playthroughs. Nobody dissecting whether the cat-catching loop holds up across multiple hours. No one stress-testing the systems. What's out there is vibes-based — people reacting to the look of Catworld, the silliness of grandma diving onto a cat, the UE5 prettiness. Fine for a wishlist push. Not enough to actually evaluate the game.

Also worth flagging — the studio explicitly asks for feedback through their Discord and Steam reviews. That's the student-project workflow: ship close to done, gather notes, patch. Which means whatever launches in June 2026 will likely keep moving for months after.

The Hard Part Nobody Talks About

The cozy cat game genre is brutally saturated. Cat Cafe Manager, Calico, Little Kitty Big City, Cats and the Other Lives, Stray (the gravitational anomaly that warped the whole category). Buyers in this niche have options and they have opinions. A student project competing on raw production value loses that fight before the bell rings. What it can win on is specificity of charm — a weird NPC, a genuinely funny errand, an animation someone clips and posts. Chasing Whiskers seems to know this. Whether it delivers is the whole question.

The "made by students" framing cuts both ways. It buys goodwill from a slice of the audience that actively wants to support university projects, and it lowers the bar in a way that shields the team from being graded against AAA cozy releases. It also caps the ceiling. Plenty of players will skip it on principle, assuming roughness they may or may not actually encounter.

Why a Mass Push Would Fail This Project

A blanket marketing campaign for a game like this is money on fire. The audience that actually converts isn't "Steam players who like games" — it's a sliver. Cozy-game streamers with mid-size audiences who specifically program collect-a-thons and exploration titles. Cat-content creators on TikTok and YouTube Shorts whose entire feed is felines doing nonsense. Student-game advocates and indie-dev commentators who cover Breda, DigiPen, and similar programs as a beat. A few wholesome-games curators on Steam itself.

That's the list. Push beyond it and the budget just burns against an algorithm that won't reward the spend. CreatorFetch is the kind of infrastructure built for exactly this triage problem — surfacing those specific creator pockets so a studio doesn't have to cold-email 400 channels and hope three respond. For a five-person team finishing their degree, the gap between manually pitching creators and using a system that finds the right ones is the gap between a launch that gets noticed in the cozy-game community and one that quietly doesn't.

The Verdict, Such As It Is

Chasing Whiskers is too early to judge as a game. As a project, it's doing the right things — clear hook, knowing tone, tight scope, an aesthetic that fits the team's actual capacity. The errand-loop structure is a risk. The cat-ability mechanic could be either the best part or an afterthought. And the polish gap that haunts every student release is going to be real.

If you're in the cozy-cat-game demographic, wishlist and wait. If you're not, June 2026 isn't going to change your mind, and it doesn't need to. This one's aimed precisely. That's probably its best shot.