You need to play is a video series where we highlight games new and old that every PC gamer should check out.
Classic adventure games are heavily associated with comedy, but Harvester Games’ The Cat Lady is pure horror and introspection. You play as Susan, recently deceased by her own doing and subsequently resurrected by an eldritch monstrosity wearing the skin of an old woman called The Queen of Maggots. The price for bringing you back from the dead is immortality (Susan isn’t happy to be alive) and the job of taking out five murdering psychopaths. It’s a lot.
But The Cat Lady cuts the violence and Lovecraftian world-building with some serious subject matter. Between jobs, Susan goes about her life, bumping into another downtrodden person in need of some love. Depression and hopelessness are the true adversaries here, with the killers functioning as the worst-case-scenario byproducts of our society’s worst cultural ills. Living with mental illness ain’t easy, but The Cat Lady is something of an existential victory lap for a former misanthrope turned stubborn optimist, all because the right person showed up at the right time.