Two cats. One park. No grip.
It is 2 AM, the acid just hit, and your two cats slipped out into the park. Acid Cats is a first-person night search with no map, no compass and no enemies — only a melting park, two synthesized meows panned in stereo, and a GRIP bar that drains the further you go. You navigate by ear. Headphones are not a suggestion.
Miso is the heavy one, the one who settles against your ribs like a sandbag and purrs into your collarbone. Comet is the one who watches you from the path, unimpressed, and who — if you black out — will find their own way home hours before you do. Cats do that. Neither of them is worried about you. That asymmetry is the whole joke of the game.
Three ghosts drift at the edge of your vision, and none of them do anything. They cannot touch you, chase you, or end your run. What they can do is cost you thirteen points of GRIP the moment you look straight at one, which means the danger in this park is entirely a thing you do to yourself by turning your head. The whispers get personal the lower your GRIP goes; that is also a thing you are doing to yourself.
Each cat emits a meow panned in stereo by its true bearing and attenuated by its true distance. There is no waypoint and no glow. Turning slowly and listening to which ear gets louder is the actual mechanic, and it is why the game is unplayable on a phone's speaker and quite good on a cheap pair of earbuds.
GRIP drains only while the trip level is above 0.8, recovers slowly below 0.5, and recovers faster for every cat you are already carrying — 1.1/sec each. Scooping a cat returns 14 outright. So a player holding one cat is meaningfully steadier than a player holding none, and the game gets easier exactly as you succeed at it. Hit zero and you black out on a bench.
GRAB reaches 2.6 metres to the nearest cat you have not found. There is no aiming involved — if you are close enough, you get the cat — because fumbling a cat you had already located would be a punishment for the ears, not the hands.
A cat is worth 400 points plus a bonus that starts at 1,100 and falls 4 points per second elapsed. Finish with both and you also bank 500 plus eight times your remaining GRIP. Black out and your score is your cats plus the seconds you survived — always the smaller number. The fast, reckless, ghost-avoiding run outscores the careful one, which is the correct incentive for a game about 2 AM.
The aiming here is a mouse delta read under pointer lock, and pointer lock does not exist on a handset — so the on-screen D-pad that rescues a keyboard game would have moved you and aimed nothing. Instead the game carries the touch rig: a floating thumbstick on the left, drag-to-look on the right, and a GRAB button (a tap anywhere on the look side does the same). See docs/TOUCH-RIG.md.
Every number the end screen shows you, and where it came from.
| Source | Value |
|---|---|
| Each cat found | 400 + max(0, 1100 − seconds×4) |
| Both cats home | +500, +8 per point of GRIP left |
| Blacked out | your cats + seconds survived |
| Looking at a ghost | −13 GRIP |
| Scooping a cat | +14 GRIP |
| Carrying a cat | +1.1 GRIP per second, each |