One of Steam Next Fest’s Best Demos Finally Got Me Into a New Genre

With the first Steam Next Fest event of the year upon us and a lull in big releases until March, I, like many others, found myself looking through Steam’s most-played demos to see if anything caught my eye. Among the most popular Steam demos were mech-based games, RPGs, simulators, big names like Game of Thrones, and more, but there was one game on that list that stood out from the rest: Bongo Cat. After spending over 80 hours with Bongo Cat, it’s going to be a day one purchase on March 5th when the full game releases on Steam no matter what the price is.

Bongo Cat is an idle game, a genre which I admittedly paid little mind to prior to downloading the demo. “Contempt” might be a strong word, but I’d even go so far as to say I had quite the lack of appreciation for idle games prior to hanging out with Bongo Cat. But now, it’s all starting to make sense.

The game itself takes after the famous Bongo Cat meme and consists solely of a cat companion who hangs out on your screen while you work, play, or do whatever else you need to do. When you click your mouse or type on the keyboard, his hands smack the taskbar with every press (assuming you snap him to the taskbar like I did). There’s no real program window to speak of, so if it weren’t for him flailing his hands in the corner of my eye while I work, I’d forget he was there.

As you type and click, Bongo Cat keeps up with the sum of both of those inputs, but you can hide that number until you hover over him if you want to keep him even more discrete. The constant presence of Bongo Cat is nice, but where the idle game shines is through its drops.

After 30 minutes, you get a drop if you’ve clicked or pressed at least 1,000 times. I’ll be at about 170,000 inputs by the time I’m done advocating for Bongo Cat which equates to many drops of all kinds of different items he can wear on his head and, if you’re lucky, skins to change the cat’s base appearance. Mohawks, wizard and witch hats, party hats, bows, lanterns, stacks of books, gummy bears, Viking helmets, and countless other rewards I haven’t even gotten to yet await the more you click. There’s even a very lite version of an economy here: after getting 10 items of the same rarity, you can trade up to the next rarity and so on until you obtain a coveted Legendary item.

That’s all there is to Bongo Cat, but it’s enough to have me telling anyone who works at a computer and has Steam downloaded to get the game. He bangs away while I work, and when the day’s done and I settle in with League of Legends or something else that requires a lot of input, he’s still with me. Never have I ever pinned a game to my taskbar nor have I ever set one to boot up on startup, but that’s where we’re at with Bongo Cat (alongside a new appreciation for idle games).

The Bongo Cat Discord is a pretty wholesome place as one might expect with people pitching their suggestions for what the future of the game should look like, but I’m hoping everything’s kept as simple as it is now. The developer, Marcel Zurawka of Irox Games, has confirmed that the full release will include trading and selling features, and those who play the demo now will get a “Gamer” hat whenever the full release happens on March 5th. I’ve already got a suite of favorite drops that I cycle through depending on how the day’s going, but the Gamer hat and other go-tos will at least get honorary “do not trade” status as I rack up other rewards.

Bongo Cat will be released on March 5th via Steam, but you can get the demo right now to see if the full version can fit into your work day next week. If you’re in the market for another idle game after that, there’s another one that’s been climbing the Steam charts as of late.