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Neko atsume game design4/3/2023 ![]() ![]() Other than that and buying toys, the entirety of the game is played with your phone in your pocket. In fact, the most active gameplay you can actually do in the game is just take pictures of them. But with Neko Atsume, what are you really getting? The best answer I can come up with is just the opportunity to look at cartoon kitties play with cartoon toys. With games like Cookie Clicker or Clicking Bad, the desire on the part of the player is an intrusive craving for “More, Bigger, Faster” that calls to you to waste hours (and leave you feeling like your time was definitely wasted). While it doesn’t subvert the medium of idle games *too* much, (after all, you are still collecting fish to upgrade your yard) the objective is somewhat less clear. Occasionally they’ll leave gifts of fish, which you can use to buy new things to put in your yard for them to play with, or better food to attract more cats, but the real focus is just getting the cats to show up. In Neko Atsume, the goal of the game is to put food out in your yard, wait for cats to come to your yard, and take pictures of them. There was Idle Miner, which had you mining consecutively harder and harder minerals, Clicking Bad, which had you as a Walter White type figure, clicking to make Meth and Money, all while evading the authorities (insofar as one can by clicking buttons and reading text), and many others.īut the format of Idle Games has given rise to a very interesting creature that challenges the idea of what players really want from these types of games. While there is no “end” to the game, there is a clear goal: Make more cookies.Īfter the success of Cookie Clicker, hundreds of these Cookie Clicker inspired idle games flooded internet flash games sites like Kongregate or Newgrounds. The genius of this game was that it gave players the opportunity to put the game down, and wonder hours later “hmmm, I wonder how many cookies I’ve made since I stopped playing” and pick it right back up. With these cookies, you would by upgrades to your cursor to bake more cookies, or, crucially, buy devices to bake cookies automatically at some particular rate. ![]() When you clicked the cookie, you baked a single cookie. ![]() Cookie Clicker centered around literally clicking a cookie. While some earlier versions of this format existed, the first real success story in idle games was Cookie Clicker (). While the shop is open only until February 17, the Japanese site AmiAmi offers Neko Atsume goods.Perhaps one of the newest genres of the last few years is Idle Games, or Incremental Games. And to make the experience typically Hong Kong, the shop offers such items as dim sum, egg tarts, English-style mail boxes, and trams (a favourite of Ekicho-san/Conductor Whiskers). With its layout modelled after the garden featured in the game, the shop encourages fans to take selfies replicating cat poses at familiar spots. It is on level nine at Langham Place in Kowloon. While there are stores in Japan selling Neko-Atsume goods, this is the first official shop. Hong Kong was chosen for the pop-up store because it is a destination for Asian tourists as well as a hub for Asian popular cultural trends. Neko-Atsume (or Cat Collector) started as a smartphone game app in Japan in 2014, but has been taken up by cat lovers around the world who can check into their garden every day to see if they have received a rare gift from their virtual cats, or if the dreaded Manzoku-san (Mr Tubbs) has eaten all their food. Designed like a part of the game that inspired it, the world’s first official Neko-Atsume store has opened for a limited time in Hong Kong. ![]()
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