The Tuxedo Cat: a 10-minute Halloween audio story you play by talking on iPhone/iPad/Mac

By Holo Kitty, 27 October, 2026

Forum
Gaming

Hi everyone,

I've had some vision challenges this year, and I started building HoloKitty, a small audio fiction project you play in the browser. I'm the solo developer here, sharing the first story here because I'd really value feedback from this community.

The Tuxedo Cat is a short Halloween story. On Halloween night, a charming and slightly too philosophical tuxedo cat shows up at your window with a strange proposal. You talk back to it, and what you say decides how the night ends.

What it does:
- Fully audio: the narration and the cat's voice are spoken, with nothing to read
- Talk back by speaking, or type if you prefer
- Works in most languages: speak or type in yours and the cat answers in it (the opening narration is still in English for now)
- About 10 minutes, with several different endings
- No account or sign-up needed

How to play:
1. Open the link below on your iPhone, iPad or Mac
2. Start the story and allow microphone access when asked
3. When it's your turn, double-tap Talk and speak, or use the text box to type
4. If the microphone is blocked, the game tells you and opens the text box so you can keep playing by typing

Play it here: https://holokitty.app/play/tuxedo-cat?utm_source=applevis&utm_medium=forum&utm_campaign=applevis

To be upfront: the cat's voice and replies are AI-generated, which is how it can respond to whatever you actually say. But the plot, the setting and the endings came from a short story I wrote ten years ago.

I'd especially love to hear how it works with VoiceOver: anything unlabeled, confusing or hard to find.

Thanks for reading!

Options

Comments

By Singer Girl on Wednesday, October 28, 2026 - 03:58

Is the narration of the app self voicing as well? In other words, you may not use voice for this. Because if Apple is self voicing, it may not need to run. Cool though. I feel like maybe drying this out. What’s the system requirements to run this and what devices? I have an iPhone 15 and an iPhone SE 2022 both running 27.2 iOS.

By Holo Kitty on Wednesday, October 28, 2026 - 05:37

Hi Singer Girl,

Thanks for your interest! Yes, the narration is self-voicing, so you don't need VoiceOver. The cat speaks in its own voice and you reply by talking. It should work in any regular browser, including Chrome and Safari, so nothing to install, and both your iPhones should work. You will need to turn on microphone permissions for the browser to talk to the cat directly.

Please let me know if you have further questions or feedback!

Holo Kitty.

Here’s some feedback. The app does open up on the Safari browser and you do kind of need voiceover on in order to enable the tap to talk button. So it does interfere a bit with the narration of the game. I wasn’t really able to get very fire with it as I was trying to figure out the set up process. I might be able to try. Again later, but you might need to do a little tweaking with it because it doesn’t really run completely without voiceover. You might need to make it so that the buttons are detectable without voiceover because right now you do need voiceover on in order to find a tap button.

By Holo Kitty on Wednesday, October 28, 2026 - 23:06

Thanks, Singer Girl!

Really appreciate your trying it out and providing feedback. I will look into it and see if I can reduce voiceover needs and ask you again once I have a better version.

By Singer Girl on Thursday, October 29, 2026 - 00:11

Hey, no problem. That’s why you asked for feedback. Plus I love cats and I love stories. So very cool cats are my favorite animal.

By Holo Kitty on Friday, October 30, 2026 - 20:50

Hello again Singer girl,

I have made a few fixes so that you can play the game without voiceover. Would you mind trying it again? I'm also open to feedback on the microphone permissions and whether a hand-free mode might work even better. Just let me know!

The link is still: https://holokitty.app/play/tuxedo-cat?utm_source=applevis&utm_medium=forum&utm_campaign=applevis

And, Happy Halloween! :)

Happy Halloween to you too. This game is awesome. You actually do need voiceover for this. Because you have to double tap the talk button each time you need to use it. I could not get it to work without voiceover. I turned VoiceOver back on even though it said you could turn it off now. I could not find the button to tap on it without voiceover. I didn’t find any way to just tap the screen to talk to tuxedo cat so if you want us to be playable without voiceover, they may have to be a different way. Smiley face. This game is smart enough to be able to not hear voice say talk button every time. If you could make this hands-free, that actually might be easier. It’s a great game though I love it. I love the concept and it’s very cute. The only other thing is of the narrator’s voice is a bit quieter than voiceover and the rest of the game. You might want to see about increasing the volume of the narration voice to equal the one of the cat. This is so much fun though. I love it. Is there a way that you can make this an app where you can have other stories about the same cat, but have like a similar format I love the concept of this. Thanks again for showing us this. Happy Halloween to you too again. Can you make a snap app for the App Store? Can you make this an app for the App Store rather than having to play it online? It’s just a suggestion because not everybody has the best Internet connection. :-)

I used my three free games. When I wanted to continue to sign in with Google, voiceover crash and I lost speech. I couldn’t get speech at all until I went back to my home screen. Then I decided to not continue with it for now. But I may try again at some point and sign in again. I love this little game. This is so fun especially cause it’s a cat. Cats are my favorite animals. I love the whole interactive play here. Just need to make the narrators voice the same volume as the cat voice because it’s really soft. This is an iPhone SE 2022 running 27.2 iOS. Will you be able to make this a regular downloadable app for the App Store? It’d be cool to play off-line.

By mr grieves on Saturday, October 31, 2026 - 16:53

I played through this on my Mac. I disabled VoiceOver when it said. The instructions were a little iPhone specific in that I couldn't really tap on my screen. But I pressed space and it worked so wasn't that confusing. It was a fun little game but it ended too soon. If this is just a taster then it worked well and made me want to keep going.

I thought the game mechanics worked really well. It was pretty responsive. On the whole it seemed to understand me without problems. It obviously must be following a script, so it is going to interpret my answers in a set number of ways. For example it asked me what was keeping me in and I said "ghosts" but its response didn't make a lot of sense. But you can't program for everything unless you let the AI go rogue so I wouldn't call that a criticism just an observation.

So I'd say - keep going and I look forward to what comes next. Thanks for sharing it with us.

By Holo Kitty on Saturday, October 31, 2026 - 23:17

In reply to by mr grieves

Thank you for the detailed feedback and encouragement, Mr. Grieves!

I will try to make the instructions compatible with both phone and PC as you suggested. Otherwise I'll think more about improving the gameplay experience based on your feedback. Will keep you posted.

Happy Halloween!

HoloKitty.

By Earle on Sunday, November 1, 2026 - 02:35

I just tried playing this game by turning VoiceOver off and it is working fine. I am using an iPhone 18 Pro Max and had no problems tapping on the screen to start talking and then tapping when I was done. It works as expected and VoiceOver is not required at all.

By Singer Girl on Sunday, November 1, 2026 - 03:54

How did you do that? I tried tapping with a single finger anywhere in the screen and it didn’t work for me at all. I’m using the game on an SE 2022. But that shouldn’t make any difference. I tapped anywhere on the screen, like it said to do, but there was no response at all from the game until I turned voiceover on. It actually tapped the talk button itself will double tap it. I’m curious to know why this is working for other people and not some of us.

Hi Singer Girl,

I believe the issue is that you tapped right after the narrator says "turn voiceover off", but before the cat starts talking. Just wait until the cat started talking and try turn off voiceover/tap to talk then.

Let me know if that works!

Holo Kitty.

I turned VoiceOver off when I was prompted to. Once the cat started speaking, I waited until it was finished. Then I tapped the screen once with one finger. I heard a beep and started speaking. When I was done speaking, I tapped the screen again with one finger and heard another beep to indicate that it accepted my input. Then the game just continued as expected.

By Singer Girl on Sunday, November 1, 2026 - 22:19

I’ve already used all my free games. And then when I tried to sign in with Google, I had a speech crash. Completely lost voice over speech so I won’t be trying that yet until we can get that fixed. I turned off voiceover as soon as I was prompted to turn off voiceover. And I’m pretty sure that I waited for the cat to be done talking, but I still wasn’t able to get anywhere tapping the screen. I can try again if I can get signed in but right now I can’t so we’ll see what happens with us. I guess the only thing I would say that I owe feedback is to make a narrative volume match the cat volume because it’s a lot softer. narrator voice is much softer than the cat voice.