This game has gone through a lot of ups and downs with its difficulty and parse-ability through many play tests. I often found myself erring on the side of "it needs to be harder, they just got lucky", which, is probably a bad mindset when it comes to a game as aggressively opaque as this one.

They say in game design circles that its dangerous to rely too much on output randomness (which is this game's entire focus) because it can easily lead to situations that feel cruel. e.g. while it may be unlikely that you continuously get the worst outcome, when it happens, it can feel like the game is out to get you.

This never came up in my play tests, but I tried playing and the cat managed to choose the worst possible direction when left to her own devices 5 times in a row (this is rolling a 25% chance 5 times or 0.09%). Yikes.

While still technically possible, there's now an underlying "mercy" system that makes this less punishing. The more that the worst outcome happens, the more likely that it won't happen going forward. While this game is supposed to be frustrating by design, I felt its current state was too much.