Castle Cat is a series of platformer flash games created by the late video game developer Felix Wiesner (nicknamed Wiesi) and published by his production game site Mausland Entertainment on the popular video game and animation site Newgrounds. The series contains five entries, with the first four releasing from 2004-2006, and the fifth and final one being unreleased but shown as a demo sometime around 2021-2022. The main character is a gray cartoon cat with a head in the shape of a castle. The first game has Castle Cat climbing up a castle while avoiding knights and tornadoes. The final boss is a dragon who breathes fire. The sequel takes place in the tropical setting of Miami and gives Castle Cat items to fight his enemies for the first time including maces and cannons. The third game is set in Las Vegas at night while the fourth game in the series replaces the maces and cannons attacks with a powerful laser gun with the goal of rescuing a princess cat from an evil dog. The fifth and unreleased game in the series takes place in an airplane. The Castle Cat series is famous for its surreal and edgy humor, along with its numerous remixes of popular songs. However, Castle Cat 3 and 4 have a particularly sinister reputation regarding their game over screens.
Below if a YouTube video of a full walkthrough of all four of the Castle Cat games for reference.
Castle Cat 3 and 4 are the ones with the infamous game over screens. Upon dying in Castle Cat 3, the game presents players with a black trash bag wrapped with gray tape that reads “DEAD CAT”. It’s unknown what exactly is in the bag and if it actually contains a dead cat, or if it’s just an elaborate hoax. Whatever the case, the photo scared many people, especially kids who happened to get a game over screen in Castle Cat 3.
Yet Castle Cat 4 somehow takes it a step further with its game over screen. Any player unfortunate enough to get a game over screen in the fourth game is greeted with a truly unsightly image of a black-and-white photo of a person holding the mangled and mutilated carcass of an animal, supposedly a cat, with bright yellow text which reads “YOU ARE DEAD !!! PLAY AGAIN”. The carcass is obviously roadkill, but the carcass is so badly damaged that it’s almost impossible to identify the deceased animal.
The roadkill image is incredibly unsettling, and so much so that it’s actually hard to find on Google. When I was making this post I actually had a hard time trying to find an image of the photo outside of the one YouTube video, Castle Cat – Game Over Screens by Importgt, that has it. The reason for the inclusion of these two incredibly disturbing photos as game over screens for Castle Cat 3 and 4 is still unknown to this day, but I definitely count myself lucky that I was spared that type of imagery as a kid scrolling through Newgrounds games.
Below is the YouTube video by Importgt of all the game over screens from the Castle Cat games. The game over screen for the fifth game gets an honorable mention from me personally since the cartoon gore is pretty bad, but it’s still nothing compared to the black trash bag and roadkill photos from the third and fourth games.
Sources
The Hidden Vault 
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