Neko Atsume is a mobile idle game where you set cat toys and food in your backyard, come back a few hours later, and take pictures of the neighborhood cats that have been attracted to the yard. When the cats leave they give you silver and gold fishes as gifts, which are the currency used to buy more cat toys and fancier cat food. Gameplay is self-directed but given that the title means Cat Collector and the game partially obscures cats you haven't seen, the primary goal is to track down and take pictures of all cats. Some cats have special conditions, like a seasonal requirement, a specific toy, or they're just plain rare; but most cats are decently common and will play with any toy.

Like all free mobile games, there are microtransactions. You can buy packs of gold fish in far greater quantities than the cats will dole out for the low low price of a few dollars.

I always thought this was a funny way to monetize a mobile game. Most predatory mobile games put up arbitrary walls with the purpose of annoying players into coughing up money. But I interpreted Neko Atsume as a game about the act of waiting; it's a game about slowly saving up and accumulating fish over the course of a week so you can buy the expensive Antique Chair; it's a game about deciding whether to splurge on the tuna or just buy the kibble. So when the game puts a glistening "Buy Gold Fish" button on the screen I want to actively avoid clicking the button.

The vast majority of things to buy with your fish are just more item PNGs for the cats. Different cats like different toys, but cheap and expensive toys alike all attract roughly the same amount of cats. There is no "best toy", and if there is, the game does not surface that information. It's all very low-stakes.

So when you pay money to buy gold fish, you skip the act of waiting, and the act of waiting is what makes the game. I know I'm sounding like that "sense of pride and accomplishment" Reddit comment but there really is no gameplay in Neko Atsume besides waiting!

At one point on my previous phone I bought all the items in the store. It's actually not very fun to be a fishillionaire? When you buy out the store there are no fish sinks remaining apart from cat food. And yes, it's true that some items have obvious advantageous effects - better food attracts way more cats, and the House Expansion (a one-time purchase) allows placing twice as many toys - but again, saving up your fish for these items is part of what makes the game fun. Neko Atsume is boring when there's nothing to save up fish for.

What's extra funny is that cats have a small chance of giving you a "memento" when they arrive (a rubber band, a plastic spoon, seeds...). The chance is very low and it usually takes dozens of visits for a cat to give you their memento. If you want to collect mementos, spending wads of real money won't even help, since it still takes many visits over many weeks and you can only put out 5 or 10 toys at a time. If you collect fish the old-fashioned way, you at least accrue chances to get mementos at the same time.

And yeah Neko Atsume 2 recently came out, which added vector graphics, more ways to spend fish (toys have durability?? ), as well as more ways to spend real-money including a monthly subscription, eugh. It hasn't been out long enough to determine exactly how much more extractive they're trying to be, but my first impression is it seems like they're trying to go back and fix a mistake; "oops, we didn't monetize our viral-hit mobile game enough, and if we add more MTX now it'll piss people off...".

And of course Neko Atsume is a fun game as far as mobile games go because it's not ridiculously extractive. I am very explicitly a fan of the way Hit-Point is bad at running a business. This feels weird. Anyway I have a roll of Neko Atsume Masking Tape and some other silly things in the mail, will update when it arrives.