Google is celebrating Halloween with an interactive game about a spell-casting cat who uses her powers to defeat ghosts after they invade the Magic Cat Academy.
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The Google Doodle follows Momo the cat as she casts spells to defeat the school's attackers and recover a master spell book over the course of five levels. Players vanquish ghosts by drawing symbols that appear over the phantoms' heads.
"Doodling for a whole Doodle game was very exciting for us," the team behind the Halloween Doodle wrote in a blog post. "We had so many ideas for elaborate symbols to draw, like a witch's hat that would appear on the character's head after it was drawn! In the end we decided that for a short game against the clock, simple was better."
The feline protagonist was inspired by Momo, a real-life black cat owned by one of Google's Doodlers. Originally, developers envisioned having a magic cat make a soup so good it raised the dead, but they opted instead for a cat at a magic school.
"Connecting soup to Halloween proved too abstract, so the team shifted to the idea of a wizard school," the team said. "This opened the door to a more robust world filled with interesting characters and paw-some themes."
Magic Cat Academy can be played on Google.