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Knowledge-driven exploration is the design idea Ylem's Cat is built around, and the phrase the developers use to describe the whole game. The structure is close to a Metroidvania, but the thing that blocks the player is not a missing ability. It is a missing realisation. The character could always have done it; the player just had not worked out that it was possible, or what it was for.

The team calls this a knowledge lock (知识锁), and has adopted the community nickname for the subgenre in its own materials. Exploration and puzzles together make up roughly two thirds of the game, with combat making up the rest.

How a Knowledge Lock Works

The clearest worked example the developers have given is a crystal wall early in the demo. It cannot be broken by attacking it and no mechanism nearby opens it. The solution, which surfaces later, uses the laser the player has been carrying since the beginning. No item is picked up and nothing is unlocked in a skill tree between failing at that wall and solving it. The only thing that changes is what the player knows.

This applies to Mio as well as to the world. The producer has said the cat does not simply roam wherever it likes, and that the limits on its movement are tied to the same knowledge-lock design: Mio may have an ability from the start, with the understanding of what it is for arriving much later in the story.

The Laser and the Cat

The player can aim a laser pointer, and Mio will chase the dot the way a real cat does. This is the primary way of directing the cat: onto a switch on a ledge Molly cannot reach, into a gap only the medium form fits through, or across a room to trip a mechanism. Puzzles in the demo regularly asked the player to combine the traits of two different cat sizes in one solution rather than using a single form throughout.

Mio's ordinary behaviour carries information too. Its tail may swing toward something worth a look, its coat stands on end near enemies, and its idle mood shifts with what is nearby. The Mio page lists the behaviours and what each one signals.

Puzzle Vocabulary in the Demo

• Doors and walls formed of crystal that resist direct attack.

• Paths blocked by lasers.

• Mechanisms that only the cat can reach or operate, some of them needing two different cat sizes in sequence.

Hints were added to the demo specifically, to keep testers from stalling inside a one-hour session. They are not a statement about how much guidance the finished game will give.

The Journal

A journal (日志) records the enemies, characters, local customs and culture the player encounters. The producer treats it as an important part of how the world is understood rather than a collectible list, and has noted that testers opened it late in the demo, so better signposting toward it is planned.

Structure of the World

The three silent giants are the structural spine of the game rather than set dressing. The team locked down three giant regions first, each with its own mechanic, its own ecology and its own visual spectacle, and derived the civilisation, the plot and the enemies from them afterwards. Each of the three is to have an observation mechanic of its own in the finished game, and the producer has named building those as the team's biggest remaining challenge. The regions themselves are covered on the Yilun Star and the Silent Giants page.

Note that the game is not open world, despite that description circulating after the announcement. No developer statement supports it. The main story is a roughly 15 to 20 hour path across those regions, with no New Game Plus and no multiple endings planned.

The Demo Level

The build shown to press in August 2026 was a linear level of about an hour taken from early in the game. Molly has just been revived by Mio and is making her way back to her village while unidentified mechanical Sentinels pursue them, through grassland, ruins and a dark cavern. None of those areas has a published name.

What Is Not Known

• No region, biome, settlement or ruin has an official name.

• The observation mechanics of the three giants have not been described beyond the fact that they will exist.

• No map, map structure or region count beyond the three giant regions has been published.

• No puzzle item has a name. The laser pointer is unnamed.