Cat Girl without Salad: Amuse-Bouche

In Cat Girl without Salad: ~Amuse-Bouche~ players meet Kebako, a cat girl with a penchant for junk food and a notoriously bad memory. She has always been a girl of many interests, and her latest "hobby" is intergalactic bounty hunting. With her faithful companion (Or is he her pet?) Squiddie by her side, she is out to clean up crime, make the universe a better place...and inevitably leave a wake of destruction in her path.

The game initially appears to be a standard side-scrolling shoot-'em-up, but suddenly takes on new life when collecting a weapon upgrade. The standard pea-shooter is replaced with a bizarre weapon referencing another genre of gaming. For example, the Puzzle Gun fires color-coded spheres that stack on top of each other and destroy every enemy onscreen when three of the same color are matched together, the Rhythm Gun requires the player to press the arrow keys to the beat of the music to fire powerful blasts, and the RPG Gun outright replaces your standard weapon with a Final Fantasy-esque menu as your means of attack. While many of them are deliberately unwieldy, their incredible damage output compared to the pea-shooter makes them almost a necessity to defeat enemies and progress.

It contains only three levels, each with a unique set of enemies and a boss at the end.

Cat Girl without Salad: ~Amuse-Bouche~ was previously not available and made its debut in the compilation Humble Monthly Bundle: June 2016. After that is was not available separately or standalone, but could and can still be played as a Humble Original through the Humble Trove. The game was released as a free standalone title briefly between 18th January and 2nd February 2018. It was originally announced in 2013 as an April Fools' joke, but eventually became a real game.