Illustration by Suhani Gupta

The main gameplay includes multiple cooking facilities, where cats chop vegetables like carrots and cabbage. All stations are located in the overlying cat forest, where they can be arranged and personalized.

Nestled deep in a forest, cats cook soup in a cozy village. They work around the clock to create masterful dishes and earn enough money to live in luxury. 

While this charming scenario may seem like a fantasy, it comes to life in the idle mobile game Cats & Soup. The main gameplay includes multiple cooking facilities, where cats chop vegetables like carrots and cabbage. All stations are located in the overlying cat forest, where they can be arranged and personalized, and each station comes with one new cat. Every cat possesses a specific skill aligning with a station and a star rating ranging from one to five. Because each station is controlled by a different cat, a correct cat-station pairing can generate more gold.

The cats from the vegetable stations bring their products to the soup station, where another cat makes vegetable soup. The soup can then be sold to earn gold for purchasing new facilities and upgrading stations.

From time to time, different functions such as photo opportunities, hot air balloons and cat or jar fairy gifts may pop up. The photo opportunities show up on the bottom right side of the screen, and an internal photo function takes pictures of the cats in their forest, giving the player some gold in return. Hot air balloons emerge periodically in the forest, where they can be tapped in order to “shake” their gold out. Gifts from the player’s cats appear on the bottom right as well. Jar fairy gifts are accessed through watching advertisements, so they offer more gold than any other activity.

Along with gold, players collect four other currencies: recipe points, stamps, furniture coins and gems. Players can use recipe points from rest stations to upgrade cooking stations. Stamps accumulate with each ad, and they are used to purchase decorations. 

Furniture coins, a currency for furniture decoration in mini-cat rooms, and gems, a currency for changing the appearance and skill of the cats, only appear in gifts, so they can be difficult to collect. Decorating mini rooms is one of my favorite parts of the game. With a diverse range of furniture and many avenues to collect different furniture pieces, there are countless ways to make the rooms unique and suited for each individual cat.

While the game is usually enjoyable, it comes with many advertisements, which can detract from the playing experience. The ads are optional to watch, but certain rewards can only be gained through them. Most of the mini games and events function entirely off of ads, so the game is more fulfilling when I watch them. To counter the annoyance of sitting through advertisements, I usually watch YouTube videos or movies while playing. 

Whether I need to resist boredom, decompress or merely keep my hands busy, Cats & Soup always delights me with its charming ambiance. Watching the little cats run around the forest never fails to make me smile, even on the roughest days.