TAKE CARE OF THE CAT

The dog does the caretaking this time. That’s the detail that catches longtime fans off guard in TAKE CARE OF THE CAT — after the original game put you in a human’s shoes looking after a dog, this short follow-up flips the entire premise, casting you as the dog itself, now responsible for keeping a cat warm through a cold night.

Playing As the Dog in TAKE CARE OF THE CAT

The premise sounds almost too simple: it’s cold outside, and the dog needs to keep the fireplace going to keep the cat warm. That’s the entire setup TAKE CARE OF THE CAT hands you at the start, and it plays it completely straight for a while, letting the low-poly, PSX-style visuals and the quiet, atmospheric soundtrack from composer lixtrixx do most of the emotional work before anything unusual happens. Character design from somyeraa keeps both animals expressive despite the deliberately blocky retro art style, which is part of why the tonal shift later hits as hard as it does.

Controls stay minimal by design — WASD to walk, left mouse button to interact, and right mouse button to bark, the last of which is unique to this entry precisely because you’re playing as the dog rather than the human protagonist from the original game. Beginners often forget barking exists as a tool at all, since the early minutes give you little reason to use it, and only realize its purpose once the game actually calls for it later on. Players coming straight from the first game, expecting to manage a pet the same way they did before, are usually the ones most thrown by having to think in terms of a dog’s senses and abilities instead of a human’s.

The developer, bodinhe, explicitly recommends treating this as a “late-night game” — playing with the lights off and a headset on once the rest of the house is asleep — and that’s not just flavor text. The game’s pacing depends on that kind of quiet, isolated attention, since a lot of its tension comes from ambient sound design rather than scripted scares. Players who’ve streamed TAKE CARE OF THE CAT with room lighting on and no headset consistently report a noticeably flatter experience, which says a lot about how deliberately the audio and darkness are doing the heavy lifting here.

Completionist-minded players tend to treat that first playthrough almost like a checklist, methodically interacting with every object near the fireplace before moving on, while players who came in purely for the horror tag tend to rush straight toward the forest, half-expecting the calm opening to be a fake-out. Both approaches work, but they lead to noticeably different first impressions of how slow or fast the game feels.

The Fireplace, the Forest, and the Turn

Keeping the fireplace lit functions as the game’s core loop early on, and it’s deceptively easy to treat as a background task rather than something with real consequences. Players who let the fire die out, or who wander too far from the cat while exploring, tend to be the ones most surprised by how quickly the mood shifts once the story pushes you out into the dark forest section that most reviewers single out as the game’s tensest stretch. Once that forest sequence begins, the game stops giving you the same margin for error it offered during the fireplace routine, and several players describe realizing too late that their earlier carelessness was already shaping what came next.

That forest segment leads into a chase-and-puzzle sequence that multiple players have flagged as the highlight of TAKE CARE OF THE CAT, striking a balance between genuinely stressful and fair enough not to feel cheap. It rewards players who paid attention to environmental cues planted earlier rather than pure reflexes, which is a deliberate departure from jump-scare-driven horror games that lean entirely on timing. A sheep appears near the end of this stretch, and its unexpectedly detailed, unsettling design against the otherwise blocky retro art style is one of the most frequently mentioned single details in player comments — a small touch that lands harder than a jump scare would, precisely because nothing in the earlier, gentler sections prepares you for something rendered with that much extra care.

The two-ending structure is the other piece that keeps coming up in discussion: how carefully you’ve tended the fireplace and cared for the cat earlier in the playthrough feeds into whether you land on the good ending or the bad one, which is exactly why several players describe going back for an immediate second run the moment the credits hit. Community reaction videos that showcase both endings back to back have become a small subgenre of their own around this release, since the two outcomes diverge sharply enough in tone that seeing only one leaves an incomplete picture of what bodinhe built.

The most honest criticism circulating in the comments isn’t about the forest or the twist — it’s length. More than one player has said outright that TAKE CARE OF THE CAT is very good but very short, and with an average session clocking in at just a few minutes, that’s a fair trade-off rather than a flaw the game tries to hide; it’s priced as pay-what-you-want, so the brevity reads more like a tightly focused short story than an unfinished game stretched thin.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Do you play as the human or the dog in TAKE CARE OF THE CAT? You play as the dog this time, a direct flip from the original TAKE CARE OF THE DOG where the player controlled a human looking after the dog, and that role reversal shapes how the story and its mechanics, like barking, are used throughout.
2. How many endings does TAKE CARE OF THE CAT have? There are two confirmed endings, a good one and a bad one, and multiple players have specifically replayed the game immediately after finishing just to see the ending they missed, since the divergence happens late enough that a single playthrough only tells half the story.
3. Is TAKE CARE OF THE CAT connected to TAKE CARE OF THE DOG? Yes, it’s a direct sequel from the same developer, bodinhe, continuing the same short-story format but swapping which character you control and what threat the story builds toward, right down to giving the dog its own unique bark interaction the first game never needed.

Between the fireplace you’re trusted to maintain, the dark forest chase, and that unsettlingly well-rendered sheep waiting near the end, TAKE CARE OF THE CAT turns a five-minute premise about warming up a cat into one of bodinhe’s tensest short releases yet.