A precision platformer with cats and spikes
I wanna be The Cat is a hard 2D roguelite platformer in the spirit of the I wanna be the Guy fangames. You run, jump and dodge through levels packed with spikes while fighting enemies and bosses that are famous videogame characters redrawn as cats, all chasing the title of "THE CAT". Levels are generated from a pool of more than 2000 community-made stages, so the layout, objects and enemies you meet change on every run. The difficulty keeps climbing as you go, and you can adjust it whenever you want to keep the challenge where you like it. The controls are tight and responsive, which matters when a single mistimed jump ends a life.
Playing together
The group-friendly part is Race mode, which puts up to 8 players into a fast-paced race against each other, with other players from around the world able to join in. You can race on a seeded course so everyone runs the same layout, or let the game generate one at random, and you pick the difficulty before the start. Only one racer takes the throne, so the mode rewards speed and clean movement rather than long-term grinding. Outside of racing, Solo mode is the single-player run: you get 100 lives to finish the game, and running out sends you back to the start. Shops along the way sell objects, skills and extra lives, and each finished run earns permanent upgrades that carry into your next attempt. Magic Tower mode unlocks after you beat the game on hard mode; it is a key-and-lock puzzle RPG climb where you fight enemies up to the top floor and manage your resources carefully.
Before you start
Expect difficulty. Spikes are everywhere, all 12 bosses are built to kill you quickly, and permadeath is the default rule in Solo mode. The upside is that deaths feed into unlockables and permanent upgrades, so runs are rarely wasted. Difficulty settings let less experienced players soften the early stages while keeping the later ones rough. Magic Tower is a separate mode with its own pacing and is worth more than five hours on its own, but it sits behind the hard-mode clear, so plan on putting time into the main game first.