Despite the game's nature, there's plot elements that can spoil the final product, so I will only be including spoiler-free details about the game. The spoilers are probably going to be everyone's favorite part about the game, so I have to try and convince people by showing that the base game is worth interest.
We're two paragraphs in, and we haven't even talked about the cat in the title. If you can't guess, that sad cat's name is "Cri." It's the name the Sexy Seven originally gave him, and you can guess how mature we were just through those three little letters. He's a depressed cat that's sensitive about his weight, behaviors, and just about everything, actually. Gabe meets this character in Safehaven, an old server he managed to find a way inside, despite the fact the Sexy Seven deleted it a long time ago.
In there, you run into other felines, such as Wheeze. In contrast to Cri, Wheeze's only characteristic is his joy, most apparent in his inability to stop wheezing and his unfading wide grin. These two characters may seem harmless, until you consider Cri's weight and Wheeze's curse: a killer joke. He may still be alive, but even after years, he's still barely holding on. It's best not to say what it is for your safety.
Another cool cat is Spagreg, a corrupted advertisement with only one purpose: to promote. He's the mascot of a noodle manufacturer, and has unintentionally been brought to life. In this era of sponsorships, you couldn't think ads could get worse. But now you have to defend yourself as one is coming to force you to literally consume his corporate product.
Lastly, there's a cat with various characteristics that make the previously mentioned felines seem normal. Me Perdonas has the ability to speak, just not in English. His voice echos throughout his home, the vents above. Gabe doesn't know what he wants from you and the cat is persistent about something. Surely it has nothing to do with the fact he keeps repeating the same thing, "¿me perdonas?"
Since this game's plot is intertwined with the show's, it's not really possible to finish the plot for one and not the other.
This game got pretty close to finished regarding its design stage, and even had some decent models made.
The setting and gameplay was nearly ironed out.
Other than a theme, this game had a notable amount of progress regarding its score. One of the ambient tracks was genuinely depressing to listen to.
The group would acknowledge his arrival, as these kinds of things seemed rare to small groups such as these, but nowhere to the extent that larger groups do. There was no warm welcome, but instead a response that one might find harsh or offensive. It was a test of character the group learned without ever acknowledging. Gabe recognized the ridiculousness of the situation and would continue the exchange until both parties have said enough for the either party to make a calculated conclusion. Although I make this sound complicated, it's really just on-level with dogs smelling another's ass. The group would then continue their conversation as though nothing happened, but eventually realized they could share the enthusiasm of their memories to the newcomer by taking a trip to "the old bar."
Now at the run-down bar, Gabe's attention was immediately drawn towards what wasn't a post, but instead several signs plastered on top of one another to a point where one would have to waste a decent amount of time just to decipher what they were looking at. Inside, the place was just as messy, with drawings scattered all over the floor. That's at least when whoever was drawing them had the decency to draw on paper, and not the walls, floor, tables, and anything that had the ability to permanently display a crudely drawn penis with a lack of effort and a contrasting amount of detail. Gabe's amazement would be interrupted by something else that dominated the penis population: memes.
While the bar was plastered with immature sketches, the dated image macros and formats would serve as a better method of tracking the group's mental growth as a whole. The funny images that didn't cascade into a milking-cycle were still decent enough to get a notable laugh out of the gang. One in particular sparked a nostalgic conversation between the group's older members: a cat with sad eyes photoshopped on top of it. VIIbrid would try to recollect his memories, but quickly fail. He would suggest each of the group members to try and search the place for it.
The group then separated to scavenge through the piles of memories, often getting side-tracked into off-topic conversations about certain items they found. But none of these things would really have an impact on Gabe, other than the one thing he was told to set his eyes on lookout for. After scrolling about in a manner that's still more productive than the others', he would finally run into a cat image. He would think like a gold panner, trying to find the core of all of these scattered images. After a cat in a chicken hat, a cat in a bath tub, and a smug cat at knife-point, he would find a plethora of cats with sad eyes. But more remarkably, a strange block of code that seemed to activate in his presence. A 24-hour timer was activated, and next to it, a portal. His short-term curiosity would send him into something he has never seen before.
Inside, the scenery was familiar, but ranged in distortion. Some sides were seemingly unaltered, but other sides seemed entirely corrupted. Right near him seemed to be the trailhead of the crying cat images, with one in particular being a cat getting flipped off. Gabe picked it up to observe it closer, before a zap would jolt his hand open. Currently unsure of what to do, he stayed put as the bolts became more and more frequent until the image itself started to distort. The cat in the image was bulging out, rapidly growing size. By the time Gabe comprehended what he was seeing, the cat had fully grown to a rather intimidating size.
When the room returned to silence, he finally picked up on a sound that wasn't currently there before. To his side and across the room was the sound of shuffling papers and a white blob in the center of it all. The whole bar seemed to be reacting to his presence, and the corruption blocked his only way out. But the corruption seemed to have more up its sleeves as a huge well-dressed cat appeared before him, along with an Italian aroma. As if these things alone weren't a sensory overload, a metallic thumping was growing louder overhead. The white blob was closer, and now its appearance could be made out to be a wide-grinned cat. With cats all closing in on him and little places to run, he quickly made his way around the building until he found a room to hide in.
This sad-eyed cat likely represents one of the Sexy Seven's oldest inside jokes, and whose history is so old that its origins predate any of our archives. Only fractions of its story survive through screenshots and old messages from myself at a time much I was much more familiar with the project. Cri doesn't have much more depth than just being hyper-depressed and overly-sensitive, but it should be noted that the character and the game both predate that influx of lame edits that beat the little life the image had left for us.
At some point during the development of the Faz project, I thought it would be a neat idea to apply my current abilities into making a shitpost game for the sake of taking a break. While the quality of my work was awful, my mindset has been relatively the same considering projects. Do it yourself and give it nothing less than my all. When you do this on top of pushing even further by planning out huge, elaborate projects, it can easily destroy you. So I started on it.
Like all immature FNAF developers, I would start by overhyping a game that doesn't even exist yet. It would start with non-subtle parodies of each game's teasers, though crudely drawn. You can see my cocky optimism in the third teaser, thinking that I could finish the game the same day I thought it up. Its demise might not have been due from just the frustration of trying to learn how to code in a day.
In regards to the actual contents of the project, it's not very clear what was in store. Surviving discussions say that it was actually going to be designed off of my old house. There's not much else.
Its original plot, if it's even enough to call it that, is simple. You flipped off a cat, and now it wants revenge. And for a long time, this is all this game would be. As you can tell, the story doesn't end here. But funnily enough, about two years later (April 1st, 2018), I would jokingly, of course, announce a Night at Cri's reboot.
After that, the only time a Night at Cri's would be mentioned before its return is when I had a small joke idea that would fit in a Night at Cri's. But then the jokes would start to become more serious when production on the ambitiously large Faz project would slow down. Eventually, the idea of a break in combination with my new half-abilities to model, compose, and code became more entertaining than the Faz project. So, once again, I would work on a Night at Cri's game to put aside my high standards and focus on getting something done.
It started out as an opportunity to mock the various and hilarious awful design choices made by kids that didn't know any better. Notable things like: a building layout that's more akin to a maze, game mechanics that are ridiculously specific for the sake of being different, and the general lack of purpose. An idea like this is inevitable when the title starts with "Night at." The game would include other characters we made up based on other cat memes. This alone generated a ton of wacky ideas that were too great to not use on a game like this.
But then I had a fatal realization. Night at Cri's could be the perfect segue for both of our two main projects: the Faz project and the Low Bar. When I anchored the Cri's game to the world of the Sexy Seven's, a large chunk of its wackiness would instantly be lost in favor of something more serious. That new foundation would cause the game to be taken a lot more seriously, with more and more of the game's concepts and plot points making sense. It would be more difficult to develop something that's intended to make sense, but the real problem would be the decision to make it the pilot for the Low Bar.
These decisions weren't at all a bad thing, it's just that these decisions have side effects. Now that the animated show and the wacky cat game were now one and the same, it meant that I would have to develop a large chunk of the show because I wasn't comfortable with the idea of improvising something that meant a big deal to me. The ideas would keep developing, but it would become harder to keep restarting the mental momentum necessary while also trying to make room for my college subject matter. Soon enough, progress would halt, not for a lack of interest or compassion, but because it ate up a lot of time and energy to do.
One day, I'd take a break from the project to work on a new game, Night at Al's. Al's was very similar to Cri's when you consider its purpose. It was made to take a break from a larger project, refrained from serious elements to focus just on putting something out, and was based off an actual old idea of mine. But unlike Cri's, it would actually see completion.
If you thought the trend of side-side-projects would end here, you're wrong, because the retro project would have a similar origin. But since my focus is still on the retro project, Night at Cri's story ends here for now. At some point, its status will be reevaluated to determine whether or not this game has a future purpose. If I find it no longer has a purpose, even with the crazy amount of ideas, the project will have to be cancelled. And unlike a lot of other things in my creative history, this would be a first.