The first thing I did in Office Cat was turn the sound off. Not out of habit. Out of survival, because the meow that plays under everything is one short clip on a loop, like your cat found the DJ booth and won’t leave. After a minute of it I started wondering if the game was mocking me.
Which is a shame, because the rest of it is nicer than it has any right to be. Office Cat is an idle tycoon where you run an office staffed entirely by cats, and it’s way too polished for a game about cat capitalism. Lovely to look at. Out of ideas long before I was done with it, which is why I’d skip it.
Thirty good minutes, then a loop
Build tables. Upgrade the office. Collect the cash. Cats sit at their desks, cats run to the toilet, money pops out in little bubbles. It’s easy to follow and it clicks along fine for about half an hour. Then you catch yourself doing the same three taps in a slightly bigger room, and it goes flat. Nothing new is waiting further in, just more of the same rooms with bigger numbers on them.
The cats write better than the game plays
The part I didn’t expect at all: the text chats. Your cat mom messages you. So does the secretary, and so does the boss. They’re random, a little dumb, and genuinely wholesome. I read all of them, which is not something I usually say about idle game dialogue.
Office Cat screenshots
Then the ads turn up
Want to claim a reward? Watch an ad. Want to speed something up? Another ad. Want the money your extraordinary boss is sitting on? One more. Every shortcut past the slow part runs through a video, and it kills the chill vibe the art worked so hard to build. You run out of your nine lives pretty quickly, if you know what I mean.
There is half an hour of real charm in here, and I did enjoy it. But half an hour isn’t a game, and what sits behind it is the same three taps with a video in the way. Give this one a miss unless the cats alone are enough for you.
