Did you Google this Halloween?

This years Halloween Google Doodle was a particularly cute one. Called Magic Cat Academy, it starred  an adorable spell-casting kitty. It’s little wonder Googlers were hooked. In the Google Doodle game, feline freshman Momo is on a mission to get back her master’s spellbook, stolen by mischievous ghosts, and to rescue her school of magic.

Players help Momo cast ghosts out by swiping in the shape of the symbol above a ghost’s head: a dash, arrow, or lightening bolt. This, I discovered, was also possible with a mouse-click, although much more fun, and obviously about a thousand times easier, with a touchpad or touchscreen. As players get further in the game, the number of ghosts appear faster, and with more than one symbol. There’s no one place to draw the shapes either; anywhere on the screen, however big or small, gets rid of the ghosts.

The game includes five levels set in Momo’s Magic School environment: the library, cafeteria, classroom, gym, and the building’s rooftop. Each level has its own boss ghost; including a chef ghost, a venn diagram ghost, and a big whistle ghost that summons other spirits.

Of course like all good things the inspiration for this year’s Halloween Google Doodle came from real life, meet the real life Momo who belongs to Doodler Juliana Chen. The original concept for the game involved a magic cat making a soup that was so good, it raised the dead. Connecting soup to Halloween proved too abstract, so the team shifted to the idea of a wizard school.

Although Halloween is over and the Google Doodle now no longer accessible from the Google home page, fear not! You can still play Magic Cat Academy and all the other Google Doodles you’ve ever loved and enjoyed here at the Google Doodles Archive.