Chonkers

There is a game where the correct strategic move is to sell a cat you have grown fond of, by weight, to an unseen family that pays gold for heft. That game is Chonkers and it is honestly a little funny that it works.

Solar Eclipse Games released it in December 2024 as a cosy idle collector: you adopt stray kittens, fill rooms with furniture, play with them to speed their levelling, and eventually hand them off for their weight in gold. The collection book runs past a hundred breeds with more than four hundred variants, including rare space cats with glittery manes. Under all the lo-fi music sits a small, genuine economy.

What the loop feels like

You fill a room with cats and furniture, then notice that a sleeping cat passively gains 4 XP a second while an awake one gains 6, and a played-with cat gains more still depending on the toy. So you start building rooms around states, not vibes.

That is the nursery strategy: group your best XP furniture with your youngest kittens in one dedicated room, feed the bowls, and let the maths churn.

That is the turnover: once third-roll cats become available, you purge the legacy generations, sell them into new families, and reinvest the gold into better stock. Players talk about scaling hourly income into the millions this way, which is a very funny sentence to type about cats.

That is the loop, and it is closer to asset trading than to pet care.

The systems underneath

Room layout is the real puzzle. Furniture is not cosmetic: high-tier and XP-boosted pieces should be paired with the rooms that need levelling speed, and the community guide recommends establishing at least three rooms early, two on functional basics before branching into themed setups for standard chonkers versus space cats. Food bowls need refilling to keep cats in their productive states. The mouse toy grants a hefty +15 XP boost and mid-game strategy largely revolves around funneling toys and furniture where they compound fastest.

If you have played Plantera or Tiny Pasture, the ambient rhythm will feel familiar, but Chonkers pushes harder on the buy-optimise-flip economy than either. It owes less to Cookie Clicker than to a very small stock market with whiskers.

Where it gets criticism

The community splits into cat people and genre people. The genre people are blunt: early progression is slow, gold returns are thin unless you grind, and the active mechanic asks you to click moving targets, which one r/incremental_games regular called among the worst implementations of clicking they had seen. Others find that once the cute animations wear off, the loop is shallower than most dedicated incrementals. Plenty of players quietly run an auto-clicker by mid-game to smooth over exactly that friction.

Playing it today

Chonkers is a paid Steam release for Windows and Linux, and our platform check found no iOS or Android listing. No mobile version, no browser version: desktop only.

Verdict

As a screensaver with a spreadsheet inside, it is lovely. As an incremental, it is a pleasant light snack with one genuinely annoying bite: the clicking. Cat lovers will get their money's worth; efficiency players should try before they commit.