I don't think I've played a game that has broken my brain as much as this one.

I was poking around the free games that Netflix lets you download on your phone, and my sister recommended this one. For context, I don't download games on my phone. The mobile market is a huge blind spot for me, so I was curious what the curated mobile subscription experience was like. To say I did not understand this game is an understatement.

I have heard the term "clicker game" before, but I've never looked into it. I'd certainly never heard the term "idle game" before. I thought I vaguely understood the concept of a clicker game, but I was clearly very wrong. I thought they were joke games, where the joke was you were wasting your time by clicking on them. Where the joke included the low effort that went into making them.

But there is so much effort in Cats & Soup. The art style is so cute, and so well intentioned for the simultaneous crispness and smallness of modern phone displays. Cell-shaded graphics with great attention to detail. Models are simple and subtle, so clipping isn't noticeable in their myriad animations. A color palette at once inviting and varied, but still muted so as to not be harsh on the eyes, even with phone brightness set to high.

And there is so much content in Cats & Soup. There are so many cats, and so many hats for them to wear. All of them adorable and tasteful. Even though I had just started the game, there were multiple shops in currencies I didn't understand, selling everything from tanooki to ents. All of which looked fun and inviting.

But then the actual "gameplay" confused me. Maybe a part of it was the purposeful animation of the first cat in his relentless soup-making. He seemed so determined, yet the only way I could interact with his soup was to... sell it? Huh? Sell it to who? Sell it why?

There was such an uncanny, disconcerting feeling to have so many elements of game design language re-contentexualed and rendered inert by the purposefully crafted pointlessness of Cats & Soup. "Selling" soup for money when there is no option to not sell the soup - the soup will sell itself eventually regardless. The soup making cat does not even look up from his work. There is no acknowledgement from the in-game world, as pressing his bowls of soup causes explosions of slot-machine jackpot coins to fly into an ever-increasing dragon hoard.

Normally, I’m used to user interface elements on top of a game screen being necessary abstractions that are accepted parts of comprehending the game world. But in Cats & Soup, I slowly realized that the cat making my soup was not the game world. The menus were the game world. Selling the soup, and the lovingly crafted animations of the jingling coins, was the game. The cat was not the game world, but the pretense. The image linked to in an NFT. A form of reassurance that it was ok to keep interacting with the game world of the menu interface and keep selling that soup.

"Buying" "upgrades" for the campsite and the soup also felt so odd that the quotation marks felt necessary. Because there is nothing else to spend the money on. There are no choices, not really. The many distinct yet occasionally overlapping currencies only obfuscate the order of events as the human mind fails to juggle them all. The expansion of the soup creation machine has a script that will be carried out. The only medium of interaction, the only expression of my human interface, was my inefficiency for bringing about this otherwise foregone conclusion.

It felt evil. I didn't know how it felt evil. Normally, when a game has microtranscations or loot boxes or some other type of nonsense, I can write it off without thinking. But here, I was playing the Netflix edition - there were no ads. There were no premium currencies. There were no in-game monetization schemes of any kind. And yet, it still felt evil.

Because I could feel the crushing weight of the implications. What is this. What can this be. Who would be using this. When. Why.

My sister showed me her regular version, and my god, the ads. They were everywhere. They were technically optional, but that somehow made them worse. The ads at least contextualized for me why the pacing felt jolting and disjointed, why some versions of interruptions felt like interruptions to the other interruptions the game’s “flow” was built around. And snapped into focus why this game filled me with such dread.

Because this game is the ultimate manifestation of the magic thread. [1] It is meant to slot into moments of time in one’s life where they don’t want to feel anything. It fulfills the desire to make time pass while nothing happens. It is a tiny sip of death made palatable by the memory of how cute the cats were the first time you saw them. Do you still obtain a dopamine molecule for looking at them the third, fifth, hundredth time? I mean, probably not. But you’d like to think you do. And that’s enough to take another sip.

But the ads. The ads the ads the ads. They exist to speed up and tempt to skip the act of making time pass while nothing happens.

Does that not break your brain? That the monetization of this game is built around an understanding that, in trying to distract yourself from life in moments of downtime, you will still feel the chill of the approach of death? The guilt of wasting your time? The quiet suffering that what you are doing is not enough? The compulsion to feel a sense of progress on something, anything, to make that feeling go away? That you will willingly watch ads to increase your progress on a pre-ordained track, when plodding along the track is the only way the pretense is kept for the whole enterprise in the first place? It's a distraction within a distraction that wraps around to needing another distraction to survive.

Like, if you need to be watching a TV show in order to have the ads not bother you, why are you doing this? Or, chillingly alternatively, if you need a TV show playing in order to tolerate the ads, in both scenarios, maybe everything you’re doing is a huge waste of time and you should find a way to love yourself more???

Obviously this works, because otherwise there wouldn’t be so many purchasable hats for all these cats. Or purchasable sakura blossoms to decorate your soup mines.

I had to delete this game off my phone after one sleep cycle, because I could feel the paranoia. I wanted to make the numbers go up. I wanted to strategize the use of the numbers to make the numbers go up faster. But there was no strategy. I just refused to click things in the obvious order, because I could not accept that it was that simple. That so much effort had gone into making such a beautiful world that existed solely to drive menu interaction that existed solely to turn me into an intentional devourer of uncurated ads.

In essence, Cats & Soup showed me the naked evil of nonsense successfully trying to get my attention.

Due to my sister’s influence, people around me have been playing this game for a week. I have the main theme committed to heart against my will. Even for those playing the Netflix version, I feel incredibly uneasy.

But I get what I’m actually upset by. The people who are keeping up with this game have hard jobs. They’re tired. Their lives are not in balance. They don’t have the energy to do what makes them thrive. They are susceptible to the feelings within which Cats & Soup is aiming to find a foothold. A year or two ago, I probably would have been the same.

I can be mad at Cats & Soup for being evil, but Cats & Soup can only exist because of other evils in our society. You won’t be susceptible to Cats & Soup unless you’re suffering from anxiety so relentless that even a facsimile of control and progress brings a quantum of solace. Its existence may be conditional, but it is still a form of evil on its own none-the-less.

Maybe a version of this game could be made that isn’t evil. But at the same time, I think I’m just trying to invent a different game that has an art style I really like.

---

1 “The Magic Thread,” in The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories, ed. William J. Bennett (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 57-63.