Tommy's Cat and Mouse

Cat versus mouse. Classic theme that always works. Tommy's Cat and Mouse from 1986 tries something similar, just with a twist — instead of scratching your nerves, it offers logic and spatial thinking at a pace that today seems almost slow.

It's a puzzle where you control a mouse and must get out of a maze while a cat chases at your heels. It's not a life-or-death chase — it's about planning moves, understanding what the opponent can do, and finding the way out before they catch you. Levels escalate and environments get complicated, obstacles multiply, narrow passages and dead ends appear, deliberately designed to corner you.

Controls are primitive — movement in eight directions, nothing more. The cat behaves according to simple rules, it's not brilliant AI, just stupid but effective. Still there's logic in it — you can lure it, offer it a false path, slip past it. Graphics are minimal, almost pseudo-graphics like old text adventures, but there's something charming in that sparseness. Sound? Those few beeps the computer makes are enough.

Such a game was part of the arsenal by which eighties computers kept kids and people wanting to train their brain entertained. It's not a big game and there's nothing malicious in it — it's simple and that's its strength. Today it looks like an archaeological find, but it holds up precisely because it knows what it wants and doesn't try to be more than it is.

Playing it today is worth it if you want to briefly return to when your computer wasn't trying to entertain all your senses at once. Tommy's Cat and Mouse lets you focus on a few things — position, passability and not having a cat chasing at your heels. That's old-school elegance.