| Quick Verdict: Desktop Cat Cafe is an idler that lets you decorate to your heart’s content all while serving snacky cat customers. Decorating is the biggest thing you can do, otherwise, you’re just idling and unlocking recipes. It’s fun, but there are some glitches that require you to close and re-open the game to fix. |
| Game: | Desktop Cat Cafe |
| Developer(s): | Samyam and Lockyaw |
| Publisher: | Zippyzappy Games |
| Review Score: | 8 |
| Cozy Score: | 10 |
| Price: | $9.99 |
| Pros: | It sits at the lower thirds of your screen, so it doesn’t mess with anything. There’s a ton of customization in creating sprawling lands. |
| Cons: | |
| Platforms: | Steam |
| Genres: | Idle |
Desktop Cat Cafe is an adorable idle game that sits on the lower thirds of your desktop. In it, you’ll be able to decorate this stretch of land on your desktop with tables, chairs, decorations, and various food and drink-making machines. Additionally, you can hire staff to man the machines so that your customers will be served automatically.
Desktop Cat Cafe is ready to take your order
The game is very simple but is bursting with items to decorate your game with. If I’m honest, I feel like most of the game centers around the design element. Once you’ve set down the things to get your cafe going, it’s mostly just decorating, waiting, and unlocking new recipes.
Recipes are opened up two different ways, either by money alone or money and selling a certain number of a specific food item. Your recipes span several categories from coffee and tea to bread and pastries.
This is one of those instances where you’re not represented in this game. Everything just works while you gaze on from a nebulous space. So, while you can’t change your appearance or the appearance of the cats in your employ, you can decorate the landscape.
Desktop Cat Cafe is a sprawling canvas that almost feels endless. The amount of space that you can open up on either side of your spawn point is almost boggling. There’s certainly enough space to put down every single idea you could ever have with the items available.
The items are pretty standard, but there are some terrain tools that you can place down as well. It shouldn’t have brought me as much joy as it did to snake a winding river path through my grassland. I love that it exists, but I love that it’s not a pre-determined shape either. The path the river flows will follow your mouse and while in build mode, you can see nodes along the shape that you can push and pull to further manipulate the shape.
Really, there’s not a lot to talk about. It’s a fairly straightforward game. Start your cafe, unlock recipes, get achievements, and decorate.
Error: Achievements not found*
Unfortunately, my achievements weren’t working when I played, which was a major bummer. I’m not sure if it’s just a setting that might’ve been turned off because I played before the official release or not. But, I tried turning the game off and on and even uninstalling and reinstalling to see if that would fix it and it didn’t.
*UPDATE: (3-6-25) The devs have been in contact and assure me that achievements work!
Otherwise, there were some superficial hiccups, but nothing major. Sometimes when decorating, the items wouldn’t properly load when you got back into live mode. For instance, I put down a tea maker and hired staff for it, but the cat was just a wire outline that didn’t load in properly.
All of these issues are solved just by closing and re-opening the game. Once the achievements start working – if they aren’t already in the full release – you’ll enjoy unlocking those and getting to build out a little utopia for the cats that come by for snacks and to just hang out.
If you want to get Desktop Cat Cafe for yourself, you can get it over on Steam for $9.99. If you’re looking for a similar game, you can check out the review we did of Ropuka’s Idle Island.
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