A multiplayer game where you play as a cat — and it has teeth

Almost every game about being a cat is a game about being alone: a beautiful walk through somewhere, at your own pace, with nobody else in it. MeowStreets is the other kind. It is a free browser multiplayer game where every player is a street cat working the same city at the same time, and the other cats are the point.

What you actually do

You are a stray with a reputation to build. That means turning over bins in the Alleys until you can afford something better, spending energy at a gym that favours the stats you want, buying claw caps and a patchwork vest, starting a course that finishes while you are asleep, and moving out of a cardboard box as soon as the rent makes sense.

Then it stops being a solo game. There is a player-run market, crews with a shared treasury, cooperative heists that need somebody in every role, bounties posted on cats who had it coming, and a chat window with whoever else is awake.

It is a crime game, not a cosy one

The cat is not decoration and it is not a softening. A failed crime puts you in a cell for real minutes; a lost fight puts you at the vet. Heat builds up in the district you keep working until it closes to you. Every piece of cash in the city was minted by somebody's crime or taken out of somebody's pocket, and all of it is recorded.

Free, in a tab, on a phone

There is nothing to download, nothing to pay and no client. It runs in the browser you are reading this in, and it installs to a phone home screen with its own icon. A visit takes a few minutes; the city keeps running between them.

Create a cat, or read the handbook first — every crime, item, gym and number in the city, straight out of the live game.