Legend of Kay

Combat is the giveaway. Most animal-mascot adventures on the PlayStation 2 treated fighting as a chore between platforms, one button mashed until the health bar emptied. Neon Studios built the opposite: three separate weapon sets for Kay the cat, a sword, a hammer and a pair of claws, each with its own combo strings, plus a block that has to be timed against enemy swings rather than held down. It is not deep by the standards of a dedicated brawler, but for a game about a talking cat learning kung fu it is startlingly serious about the act of hitting things.

The setup is old-fashioned in the best way. Kay's island has been overrun by gorillas and rats serving the Din empire, martial arts has been outlawed, and a young student with more temper than training goes off to fix it. What follows is a sequence of themed regions, jumping and climbing, boss encounters that demand you read a pattern, and stretches where Kay rides a mount or steers a boat to break the rhythm. The structure was already familiar in 2005, and the game does little to hide that.

What sets it apart is craft. The environments are bright and legible, the animation has weight, and the camera behaves better than most of its contemporaries. The German development shows in a kind of unfussy solidity: nothing here is trying to reinvent the genre, everything here works. The North American release did saddle Kay with a snarky voice performance that dates the whole thing badly, all attitude and eye-rolling, and it undercuts a story that plays perfectly straight otherwise.

It arrived late. By 2005 the mascot platformer had been squeezed out by shooters and open worlds, and a new furry hero from a small European studio was never going to command attention, whatever Capcom's American publishing muscle. The 2015 remaster gave it a second hearing and a slightly kinder reception, which suggests the original was judged more by its timing than its quality. Play it now and you find a confident, well-tuned adventure that simply showed up to a party that had already ended.