Huntrezz Janos packs 100(!) cats into a browser cloud city

Huntrezz Janos's new game is a city you could frost a cake with. CLOWDER went live on September 14 as a free browser game, and the premise is as gentle as the palette: wander a dreamy cloud city and gather the neighborhood's cats until your clowder hits 100. (A clowder is a group of domesticated cats. The more you know!) Her launch reel walks through it in her own voice, pastel streets rolling by under a graffiti-style logo.

Janos is an LA-based artist who has spent years building sculptural work and performatice work, gallery shows, commissions and AR—her WePresent commission imagined a whole cast of speculative metaverse characters, from a digiballer to a virtual therapist. CLOWDER is that practice arriving somewhere new: not a filter you wear or a render you look at, but a space that answers you back. The game runs on HTC's Viverse, and she credits a Viverse creator grant for making the build possible. (It's platform money quietly doing what art funding should do, moving an artist from depicting worlds to shipping one.)

The cat-collecting genre has a lineage, and Killscreen was there when it crystallized—we covered Neko Atsume taking over the world in 2016. Neko Atsume made you wait for cats to visit; Janos lets you go out and find them, in a city built to her own maximalist taste. Ten years of the genre, compressed into the difference between a screensaver and a stroll.