I can’t remember how I found Meowdoku, but I thought it looked interesting and downloaded it. It’s actually a good puzzler and the cats are very cute.
What’s it all about?
As the name suggests, Meowdoku is a little bit like sudoku, but maybe a little simplified. Each board has coloured sections and you need to make sure that each row, column and colour have a single cat, and they can’t touch. It seems simple enough, but it’s a nice casual brain teaser for when I have a couple of free minutes.
My family and I recently spent a few days in British Columbia, and I was super pleased to find out that Meowdoku works in Airplane Mode too. I hate when single player games won’t even load without an internet connection, and there are so many of them like that these days.
So what’s the problem?
In a recent patch, they added high score tables that reward you with cosmetics for your avatar when you win. Coincidentally, I won in my first week, placing just ahead of the second player. I thought that was cool.
I was playing in Airplane Mode most of the time, because it stops the ads appearing. Yes, I understand “supporting the developer“, I’m a bad person, I get it. I noticed that despite being completely offline, I’m somehow still climbing the ranks. That wouldn’t be weird if it was just taking the last known scores of everyone else and putting me up against those. But the opponent scores keep going up as well, which definitely shouldn’t be happening. Individual apps don’t get to override the mode that my phone is in, so it has to be fake.
But why?
I can’t figure out why you’d bother to fake an online high score table. Maybe it encourages some competitive people to keep playing, but does it? Do players of a simple mobile puzzle game really care that much? It’s not like the puzzles are crazy hard and you get as many attempts as you like, so it can’t be for bragging rights. I don’t get it.
So if you’ve got any idea why a developer would do that, please let me know in a comment below, or find me on Bluesky!
Side note: After 700 levels I feel like I’m starting to see the same type of layout repeating multiple times. I don’t know if the levels are made by hand (unlikely), procedurally-generated (most likely) or if it’s fully made by AI (the worst option). I think that means I’ll be done with it soon.
The most annoying thing for me is how much this bugs me! The game is single-player; there’s no benefit to faking this, and it’s good enough to stand on its own. It’s a weird and totally unnecessary choice the developers have made.
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