Google is famous for its doodles, and this Halloween it’s a playable game. The game became available on October 30th, 2024. It celebrates Halloween 2024 but not with an innovative game idea, instead it’s the 3rd edition of the Magic Cat Academy. You play as Momo the cat and you have to battle ghostly enemies up into the stratosphere.
While the previous 2 versions of the Magic Cat Academy found Momo fighting ghosts in school or in the ocean, this year she’s fighting against her arch nemesis, Marshmallow the ghost, in various layers of the atmosphere!
The Google Halloween 2024 game has 5 different levels, and the gameplay is basically the same as in previous years. You draw with your finger the characters you see displayed above the incoming ghosts to destroy them with your magic wand.
Because it’s a cat that fights off enemies with a wand, they’ve missed a great opportunity for branding, they could’ve called the game Hairy Potter. Get it, because Momo is hairy but she’s a wizard too.
Level 1 is easy, you get to understand how to play it. You do have 5 lives, but if you die you can restart the level you’re on. The dreadful fight takes place into the Troposphere.
After you defeat the boss in level 1 you advance into level 2 which is in the Stratosphere.
If you lose a life, you’ll see a friendly ghost in the top left corner with a heart sign above. If you draw a heart, you’ll get one life. Everytime you lose a life that friendly ghost will show up to help you. Drawing the heart is difficult though, I barely drew it correctly from the first try. At the end of level 2 you have to fight a boss, a big white spider. The most difficult symbol to draw in this level is the @ sign.
You can also pause the game at any time if you need to take a break. The more ghosts you kill, the higher your score will get. After you defeat the boss you advance into the Mesosphere, in level 3.
At the end of level 3 you get to fight a frightening ghostly cloud of some sort. Level is a bit more challenging, especially since you have to draw the symbols above its head very fast when he’s on top of you otherwise he’ll zap a life. A new symbol shows up, a lightning bolt.
Defeating level 3 pushes you up into the Thermosphere, at level 4. Things are a bit more hectic here, as you’ll also unlock some sort of constellation signs with stars to help you kill enemies faster.
Defeating the boss at level 4 pushes you up into the final layer of ghostly fights, the exosphere. Level 5 introduces a new slow down spell, where you basically have to draw a sand-glass to slow your enemies down for a bit.
Final boss in this year’s Google Halloween Doodle is a humongous bat. You’ll die a few times before killing it.
You’ll die a few times before killing it but it’s all in the eye to finger coordination. And with the help of the sand-glass you’ll definitely destroy it.
The game finishes with some cut scenes where everybody is happy and celebrating, ghosts and Momo together.
After finishing the game, they show you a screen where you can restart the game, share your score or advance onto Part 2 of the game. That made me curious and tapped on Part 2 to see how many levels there are. What do you know though, it doesn’t start another set of levels in the game you play, but instead it redirects you onto the Google Halloween doodle for 2020, where Momo was fighting in the ocean. I can bet that if you finish that one, it’ll let you advance onto Part 3 which is the pre-2020 version.
What’s strange to me is the fact that instead of this one being Part 3 and the previous 2 ones numbered correctly, they went backwards.
