Mewseum: Film Festival

In Mewseum: Film Festival, you "paint" six cat-ified movie posters by solving Shikaku logic puzzles. It's just as beautifully designed and relaxing as its predecessor, Mewseum: Masterpieces, yet the controls feel even smoother and more intuitive.

Gameplay + Details

Shikaku, invented in 1989 by a math student from the University of Kyoto and first published in Nikoli, is a grid-based logic puzzle solved by dividing the grid into rectangles each containing one number and that quantity of squares. It's less complicated than I make it sound, promise.

Controls. Mouse, or controller.
Playtime. ~6-12 hours.
Settings/Options. Sound sliders. Optional dark and windowed modes.

What Works For Me

✅ Quick and simple tutorial.
✅ Lucas Serapiao's adorable pixel art!
✅ The chill jazz soundtrack by Kevin MacLeod.
✅ Super intuitive controls that feel like painting stroke by stroke.
✅ Seamless Quality of Life (QoL) features.
✅ Each poster is broken into ~12 regions of smaller puzzles.
✅ Plenty of achievements for achievement junkies.

What Doesn't Work For Me

🟥 I need more than six posters to binge-watch The Pitt!
🟥 I'd love a bit more challenge.

Final Thoughts + Recommendation

Climbing Goat Games was kind enough to provide my curator a key in exchange for an honest review, and I honestly love Film Festival. The two posters I've completed so far are detailed, funny throwbacks to my childhood, and I really need this studio to open a print shop so I can hang the art on my walls.

Last year's Masterpieces boasted thoughtful QoL features and plenty of polish, but Film Festival somehow feels even more refined: the UI is a little more streamlined, the cursor all but glides, and reversing/reworking sections is as intuitive as breathing. I can't tell if Masterpieces turned me into a Shikaku genius or if the puzzles in Film Festival are easier, but between the possibly-reduced difficulty and smooth jazz tunes, this is the perfect game to zone out with for 10 minutes or hours at a time.

I highly recommend both games if you enjoy cats and straightforward spatial logic puzzles. You really can't go wrong here.

My pal Janner properly dives into hints and back-tracking in his review for IndieGems. I highly recommend checking it out if you're on the fence!

Follow Eekz Today for more crafting, life sim, management, strategy, and story-rich recommendations.

Check out IndieGems for more detailed reviews and the best of indie gaming, or subscribe on YouTube!

The Mewseum series has returned with a new instalment called Mewseum Film Festival . This time we are solving puzzles to reveal famous film posters rather than famous pieces of art, and of course the stars of the film are cats and the titles of the films have been given a feline twist.

There's not a great difference in the two games apart from the obvious. The music has changed from classical favourites to a jazz infused soundtrack. I'm not too keen on jazz to be honest and there are a couple of annoying tunes but these can be easily forwarded or you can mute the soundtrack completely if you wish. I would have liked the music to be film related but I understand that requires licenses and hence more money.

This instalment is just as easy to use with an ingenious interface that means correcting mistakes is an absolute breeze and it takes away any frustration that a poor system may have brought about. You are going to make mistakes because there are a lot of leaps of faith needed to try and fill the grid and it won't be unusual to realise you have taken a wrong turn somewhere, so a nice easy to use interface is so welcomed.

I really like completing these puzzles. I find them very relaxing to play and I think if you enjoy number based puzzle grids then this will be right up your street. The difficulty of these puzzles are often decided by how many unintentionally wrong choices you make. If you happen to draw the correct shapes then grids can just fall into place, but if you don't, you have to work out where you went wrong and start drawing different shapes all over the board. You can end up in a right mess.

95% of the time I was able to work out where I went wrong but if you are completely stumped there is a hint button which will tell you the shape that is correct and usually that is enough to start the ball rolling, but you have unlimited hints to use. I wasn't quite sure how I chose a particular number to use a hint on though, and often the shape which was revealed by the hint wasn't the one I wanted, so perhaps that side of things could be improved.

The achievements are progress based, but I found that playing the game in short bursts is ideal so every time I reached a new achievement landmark I quit the game and that worked out really nice.

🍳Conclusion🍳

Mewseum: Film Festival is roughly the same as Mewseum: Masterpieces but with a different subject matter and soundtrack. They are both very enjoyable and will provide a relaxing experience which is perfect for small bursts of game play.

I think I preferred the film related subject matter. The film posters look great and often contain cute or humorous cat scenes. This will definitely appeal to those who enjoy relaxing games and number based puzzles. I'm surprised there is not more attention on these games because they deserve some praise.

Thank you for reading my review. If you enjoyed it, please leave a like and follow IndieGems for more reviews like this one. We also have a YouTube channel if you would rather see game play footage with reviews.

Mewseum: Film Festival brings us back for another round of rectangle placing, this time with movie posters. It's a casual trip, with light "fill an area with rectangles" puzzling, and the sound of someone tickling the ivories in the background. I mean as in playing the piano, not as in elephant foreplay. No one wants to hear that.

There are six posters, each broken down to smaller puzzles, with most posters having well over a hundred sections to solve. There's certainly some hours worth of rectangling here. This sort of talk might scare fans of squares away, so I'd like to point out that squares are rectangles too, and there are plenty of those as well. Everyone with four sides and four ninety degree angles is welcome here. Sorry triangles, it's not your time, so pythag off for now.

If you liked the first game, you probably bought this without reading any reviews, so whatever, but if you didn't like the first game, you should buy this anyway, because things might be different this time. I mean, they won't, but don't let that stand in your way. It's certainly more fun than watching elephants mate.

So I hear.

---

Limited time offer!