My cat, Floofer, fascinates me. He has plush white fur and teeny-tiny paws, but most importantly, he loves cutting cabbage. I’m serious! With the swish swish swish of a vegetable peeler, Floofer can shred a whole cabbage in seconds.
Okay, so Floofer isn’t a real cat. But he’s still my cat.
In the mobile game Cats & Soup, available on iOS and Android, you collect cats to help you run a highly successful soup business. You have free rein to customize your cats and give them their own personalities. Name them, put them in fun and festive outfits, and buy furniture for their homes. You can even get pets for your pets. One of my cats has a hedgehog who follows him around everywhere.
You’ll be surprised by how wildly entertaining it is to watch cats make soup. My cat Rufus knows how to use an axe to chop carrots. My other cat Grayface is an expert at de-kerneling corn. By collecting cats, you can collect more soup recipes like carrot or cabbage, corn or broccoli. (We’ve even ventured into the juice-selling business. For every soup, there is a juice with the same flavor.)
The setting of Cats & Soup is a vibrant patch of greenery in the middle of a forest, where you start your business with a single cat in charge of stirring a bubbling cauldron of soup. With the profits you make selling soup, you can expand your business—buying recipes, building facilities, and getting more cats!
Clicker games — Cookie Clicker walked so Cats & Soup could run
Cats & Soup is a clicker game, which is characterized by the simple task you must perform to advance the gameplay: clicking on the screen. By spending money on upgrades, you earn money faster and faster, even while you’re away from the game, which is why clicker games are also called “idle games.” Though clicker games have the reputation of being boring or annoying—think Cookie Clicker, in which your main objective is to rapidly click on a cookie—Cats & Soup is more than clicking. The incredible level of detail in its design maximizes its cute factor. And it offers robust gameplay for anyone seeking a pleasant, cat-themed phone game for bus rides, waiting in lines, or other moments of downtime.
Cats & Soup is dubbed as “a cute idle game.” And it thrives in this simplicity.
The cuteness comes through in all the little details of the game’s visual and sound design. The cats are adorable. They have boundless energy. They traipse across the forest grounds to deliver ingredients to the cauldron of soup, or they take breaks from work, opting to roll around in a field of spring flowers or hop on a trampoline. You can unlock pieces of clothing and create outfits for your cats. I decided to dress Floofer in a wizard’s hat and a regal cloak, matching the vibes of his magic-themed home.
The atmosphere is enchanting and fairytale-like. The grass rustles in the wind. Fireflies bumble about when night falls, like sparkles dancing in the dark. Recently, I unlocked such a whimsical feature: it’s a hot air balloon, which floats by the forest every so often. When I click on the hot air balloon, gold coins shower down.
The sound effects also do a lot to bring cozy feels to the gameplay. Along with the cheery background music, you can hear things like the chirping of crickets, the tinkling of coins, and the sweet “meows” of happy cats.
On a side note: While writing this article, I realized that the game gives visual cues for sound effects. Like onomatopoeia in comics, words pop up all over the place, like the boing boing of the trampoline and the blurp blurp of the bubbling soup cauldron. I just thought that this small detail was an important contribution to inclusive game design.
Let’s discuss game lore — Cosmic Cats & Space Soup?
There’s something else about Floofer, and all of my cats, that fascinates me. And it has to do with the lore of Cats & Soup.
You might ask, where do these cats come from? Well, when you open a new facility, you need a cat to fill the position. Cut to: a view of the night sky. From up high, a group of stars take the shape of a cat constellation. Then a star plummets down to Earth, and when the flash of light subsides, a cat is revealed!
Are these cats, then, born of stars? What if they are extraterrestrial beings who simply travel to Earth in this manner? Admittedly, there isn’t much content about the cats’ off-planet upbringing, so this is only speculation. But if the cats are an alien race sent to Earth for the sole purpose of building a soup empire, there might be more to the Cats & Soup story that meets the eye.
A source of serotonin for the catless crone!
I play this game everyday. Mostly because I don’t have a pet and I desperately want a cat to snuggle. But also because the game makes me smile.
Yes, Cats & Soup is an idle clicker game. Your business is highly successful, and the soups pretty much sell on their own. But the world and the gameplay are so inviting, you can’t help but come back and spend time with your sweet little kitties.
All images in this article via Cats & Soup, available on iOS and Android.
