Games worth discovering

Why Cook Food When Adorable Cats Can Make You Soup? - Cats & Soup Review

9K View2022-09-20

I started learning how to cook when I was five. As a single parent, my mother always had to work through most of the day and early evenings to keep a roof over my head. While she was away, I had to keep myself busy, and during those quiet times at home, cooking gave me solace. Chicken soup was the first dish I learned how to cook well, so playing a game about cute cats making all sorts of stewed soups last week felt quite surreal.

Cats & Soup is an adorable, relaxing casual game about cats that literally make soup. It’s the purr-fect idle game to live out your wildest dreams of ordering around cats in a feline-run, soup-focused restaurant. And even if that’s not your dream, this game provides a wonderful way to spend a few minutes relishing a simple yet charming free-to-play game.

Like most idle games, Cats & Soup doesn’t have a bit of narrative interlaced through the game. Instead, it immerses players through cartoonish visuals and the fulfillment of raising cats and growing your shop. The occasional meows from these adorable felines running around your soup store should be more than enough to keep you playing longer than expected. I mean, have you ever willingly stopped petting a cat? I know I haven’t.

These wide-eyed felines were the first thing to draw my eyes when I started the game; they were also the only reason I kept playing. Despite cooking and managing the shop being half of the experience, I won’t deny that the real pull for me was to expand my feline empire of enthusiastic soup-stirrers, vegetable-choppers, and juice-blenders.

At Cats & Soup’s outset, I was given a small lot of land that made up my store. Like any business, the only way to expand my soup restaurant was to make money continuously. That’s where these adorable kitties came into play. At the center of that land sat a giant pot of soup—so massive, in fact, that I always worried about the cat in charge of stirring it accidentally falling inside. From those humble beginnings, I had to purchase areas for other cats to work and contribute to the soup-stewing.

The stations that you purchase as your culinary empire expands in Cats & Soup change up the rhythm of the game. These additions function as places for cats to chop carrots or shred cabbage or perform other types of prep-work to add to the giant pot and build the variety of soup on offer. The different types of soups are functionally identical, but they’ll sell for varying amounts of gold.

Gold is the main currency for progression in Cats & Soup. With enough gold, I was allowed to level up my soup recipes, which meant that I would earn more every time my cats produced that particular dish. Although I couldn’t decide which soup I wanted produced at any given moment since the cats work autonomously—have you ever tried telling a cat what to do?—I had a regular stream of gold coming in. Even when I left the game, these adorable cats wouldn’t stop working, and I admit I felt somewhat guilty for putting them on such a rigorous schedule.

Given that Cats & Soup is an idle game, you shouldn’t go in expecting all that much depth and dimension to the gameplay. I would check in for maybe ten or fifteen minutes every hour or so, and that was plenty to keep things running smoothly. If you’re looking for more in-depth cat-themed options, my colleague wrote an excellent collection of some wonderful games (including Cats & Soup) that might scratch that itch.

Besides collecting decorations, felines, and achievements, Cats & Soup doesn’t offer much in the way of goals. The game’s entire focus is on the grind to make your restaurant bigger and better. That singular objective didn’t stop me from playing and enjoying the game periodically whenever I had the time to spare. I couldn’t really abandon these adorable furballs; my heart wouldn’t allow it.

As tends to be the case with idle games, ads and microtransactions were everywhere in Cats & Soup. The best I can say is that these elements weren’t forced or required to overcome a costly progression wall. I played for a few minutes at a time for days without dropping money and found the experience to be quite pleasant.

Even if the real world poked its head in from time to time via ads, I enjoyed Cats & Soup’s simple, relaxing charm. I just wish I could’ve done a little more to interact with these paw-sitively adorable felines beyond just telling them to make soup or drinks. Still, Cats & Soup is a great casual game that I’ll continue relishing, both as a reminder of my personal journey in cooking, but also as an excuse to continue assembling my empire of adorable cat chefs.

SCORE 3 STARS OUT OF 5

PLAY IF YOU LIKE:

• Kuma Sushi Bar. If you enjoy animals cooking food, Kuma Sushi Bar, Cats & Soup won’t disappoint. Feel free also to read my review of Kuma Sushi Bar on TapTap.

• Old Friends Dog Game. If cats aren’t your thing, but you’re still looking for a casual game about animals, Old Friends Dog Game might be the game you’re seeking. Take a dive into my review of Old Friends Dog Game if you’d like on TapTap.

💬 Have you played Cats & Soup? If you could only eat one soup dish for the rest of your life, what would it be?

CHECK OUT SOME OTHER RECENT REVIEWS FROM TAPTAP: