Fresh Find: Inspector Waffles: Early Days, a Cat Detective on a Real Game Boy

Film noir is not the first thing the Game Boy's little green screen brings to mind, but Inspector Waffles: Early Days makes a surprisingly good case for it. This brand-new 2024 cartridge casts you as a rookie cat detective in a grimy city of cats and dogs, and it plays like a pocket-sized point-and-click mystery.

A hard-boiled cat detective, running on a 1989 Game Boy.

What It Is

Published by Broke Studio and developed by Goloso Games, Early Days is a top-down detective adventure. You play the young Inspector Waffles in his first days on the job in Cat Town, notepad in paw, hunting for clues and questioning the witnesses and suspects, trying to work out who the real culprit is. Like Broke Studio's other releases in the collection it is a proper boxed cartridge that runs on the original DMG-01, the Game Boy Color and the Game Boy Advance.

A Prequel That Lives on Two Handhelds

The name is not new. Inspector Waffles began life as a modern noir point-and-click adventure, released on Steam and GOG in 2021, a loving pastiche of classic detective games starring a deadpan cat gumshoe. Early Days is a prequel to that game, and rather than a straight port it was built as a genuine handheld title in its own right.

The same sleuth also stars on Panic's Playdate: one game, two tiny handhelds.

The really charming part is where it landed. As well as this Game Boy cartridge, Early Days was released for Panic's Playdate, the tiny yellow 2022 handheld with a hand crank on the side. So the same feline detective now headlines two of the most characterful small screens in gaming, one from 1989 and one from more than thirty years later. Very few modern indie games can claim to run on both.

A Broke Studio Cartridge

Like Lost Treasure of Lima, this cartridge comes from Broke Studio, whose French workshop presses brand-new Game Boy games by hand. The story of that factory is told here in the Journal.

You can find Inspector Waffles: Early Days in the collection, fully catalogued, alongside its Broke Studio siblings Lost Treasure of Lima and Fortified Zone 2.