Calico

Calico answers a question nobody asked but everyone needed answered: what if you ran a cat cafe and also the cats could be enormous and you could ride them like horses?

You are a magical girl tasked with rebuilding the town’s cat cafe. You bake goods, arrange furniture, befriend animals, and complete errands for relentlessly kind townsfolk. Along the way you discover potions that let you resize animals, change their coats, and combine species into entirely new creatures. The first time you make a cat the size of a house and climb on its back, you will laugh. Not a polite chuckle. A real laugh.

Here is where honesty matters. Calico is buggy. The physics engine is held together with hope. Your character will clip through buildings. Cats will ragdoll across the screen. The controls can fight you at unexpected moments. At launch it was rough, and while patches have improved things significantly, you will still encounter jank.

But if you can roll with it, and a lot of people clearly can (88% positive on Steam), there is something here that no polished game quite replicates. The cooking minigame has you physically shrinking down and hurling ingredients. Your cafe fills up with animals that have no business being in a cafe. A bear sitting next to a capybara sitting next to a cosmically glittering fox. Nobody questions it.

The cafe management itself is surprisingly passive. NPCs buy your goods while you are out adventuring. There is no spreadsheet optimization here. The real gameplay loop is exploration, animal collection, and potion experimentation. If you came looking for a deep business sim, adjust your expectations. If you came to ride a giant sparkly cat across a cotton-candy landscape, you are in exactly the right place.

Peachy Keen Games released a major free update called the Pawsome Edition in December 2022, adding new animals, a visual overhaul, floor and wallpaper customization, and a new cooking minigame. If you tried the original at launch and bounced off the bugs, the Pawsome Edition is worth revisiting.