Steam’s best new Animal Crossing clone is a perfect way to beat the summer heat

It’s 90 degrees outside. My air conditioner rattles concerningly as it tries (in vain) to cool down the room. I am wildly jealous of a bunch of pixel art cats in Cat Isle, an indie management simulation game released this week on Steam. They are enjoying chocolate-covered mango ice cream on an island of perpetual good weather. Insult to injury — I later unlock an AC unit with which to decorate one of the buildings on my island. As though these cats couldn’t get more comfortable. Resentfully, I watch them putter around my island, lazily fishing in the wide surrounding sea.

Against my most spiteful instincts, I am fully committed to the cats I attend to in Cat Isle. Between in-game days, I dutifully tweak the supply of ice cream I sell to accommodate their demands. I obsess over the placement of cosmetic items that would make my cats more comfortable. By the time I start a new in-game day, I have completely forgotten about the heat.

Developed by domkegames and pixekduckoo, Cat Isle is a cozy management game featuring cute, pixel art cats. Each level starts you on an island where you build some kind of shop, like an ice cream truck, fish market, or tea shop. You start by guessing how much of a given product — matcha frappes, for instance — your customers will buy. Underestimate, and you’ll miss out on potential profits. Overestimate, and you’ll have to pay back what you didn’t sell. Each day starts by ringing a bell, inviting a buoyant train of cats to your island.

The core gameplay loop is exceedingly simple: ring the bell, watch cats roam your island, watch them leave, adjust your wares based on demand, ring the bell again. A handful of additional features keep things fresh. Well-timed clicks let you fish with the cats, earning money. Clicking on a bunch of cats very fast lets you pet them, earning money. New buildings and decorations allow you to offer more products, house more cats, and, of course, earn more money. It’s a deeply straightforward supply-and-demand management sim.

Where Cat Isle sets itself apart, then, is in how beautifully it executes each simple component. The music is gentle and barely-there, leaving room for the game’s deeply satisfying sound effects. Water splashes when you catch a fish, coins clatter when you collect money, cats purr when you pet them. As you progress within a level, you unlock more shops to offer your cats, allowing you to offer more products and field more visitors.

The game’s highest selling point is absolutely its visuals. The scene that starts and ends each day, a trolley rides over a beautiful, highly reflective body of water, evokes Spirited Away. Subtle animations, like the leaves of a tree shaking gently or the fabric pouch on a bicycle flapping in the wind, make the game’s pixel art feel incredibly alive.

Image: domkegames, pixekduckoo.

The care put into this game is contagious. I found myself putting immense thought into things that absolutely did not matter for my earnings — like whether green tea or Cat Cola would pair better with the instant ramen my cats had taken a liking to. It's similarly easy to get lost in the pixel art, zooming in on individual details and cosmetic items. A detail-oriented game, it works well for detail-oriented players. While your customers tell you directly whether they want more or less than a given product, chart nerds are also given a set of graphs with which to track their sales. The game plays off of perfectionist tendencies, encouraging you to endlessly tweak your island until it's perfect.

Cozy game aficionados will likely enjoy Cat Isle, which is available on Windows PC. That said, if cozy games and management sims aren’t up your alley, Cat Isle doesn’t have a ton to offer you. It’s not trying to reinvent the wheel; it’s offering you a really, really beautiful one.