The Newest Cute Cat Collecting Game Has A Dark Secret

For those who have bought all the items and collected all the cats in Neko Atsume, there’s a new cute cat collecting game doing the rounds: Kleptocats. The concept is similar, though reversed — you have to use the in-game currency to buy cats, who then go out and steal collectibles for you. They bring you everything from books to toys to Pokeballs to… wait, is that a foetus?

At first the format doesn’t seem as effective as its predecessors — it takes ages to buy a new cat unless you relent to the microtransactions, and the items they bring you are just junk. And then suddenly, you realise that the objects are forming a story. The more cats you collect, the more they begin to interact with the objects around the room. It’s full of great geeky references, from the most mainstream to the relatively obscure.

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Then, the game reaches a point where the descriptions for the objects themselves go from naively adorable and grammatically questionable to vaguely threatening and straight up unsettling:

The game is full of little secrets that are slowly revealed as you pat your cats and send them out for more treasure. Once you’ve collected enough objects, you can see — wait, what the hell is going on in here?

I don’t know if I’m okay with this. I’m going back to Neko Atsume.