Mushroom Cats: the mushroom that looks down on every building on Earth

Between the players charmed by its sweetness and the ones who call it wasted time, the real question is whether a stroll this short still counts as a game.

Taller than every building on Earth

The backstory the game tells about itself asks the player to picture the tallest building in the world, then warns that the Magic Mushroom where the mushroom cats live stands taller still, rising out of an ocean that laps all around it. Up at the top, the cats live in little houses built into the mushroom's own cap, play instruments, sunbathe and run a mill that grinds clouds for cake. Winter is what ruins it: the Good Fairy had made a warm hat for every cat, then flew too close to the sun and dropped the lot. Finding each lost hat and putting it on the right cat is the entire job.

Two clicks settle the whole game: one on a hat, one on the cat who will wear it. Two reviews from opposing camps describe the same scene without catching that they agree — the picture does not fit on the screen all at once, and you have to push the cursor to the edge to uncover the rest of the setting. There is no puzzle to work out and no riddle to unlock: the obstacle is a visual one, finding what is already there and merely hidden.

While the cats waited, the geese and Cthulhu turned up

The studio's news wall belongs to a single person, Anatoliy Loginovskikh, and it reads like the running diary of someone juggling several projects at a time. In July 2019 he reported that he had put his other work on hold to concentrate on a game about magic geese, Cthulhu and the universe — and asked for patience. The patience paid off: a month later he announced the final boss finished, and in June 2020 he posted the release of Geese vs Cthulhu the way other people declare a public holiday.

Somewhere in the middle of that, in April 2020, he still found time to put out the demo for Mushroom Cats 2, promising five new scenes of story and riddle — the follow-up the first game cannot deliver on its own.

No stopwatch breathing down anyone's neck

The players who recommend it keep reaching for the same word: cute. A Brazilian write-up compared it to another hidden-object classic and came away finding this version the gentler of the two, and it picked out a cat dressed as Sayori, a character from another game, perched on the weather vane in the setting. Zero hours on the profile marks how quick the outing is — and the praise stands anyway.

The longest piece on the positive side came in Russian, from someone with seven hours logged, describing a pastel palette that invites you to linger in every corner of the setting. What it singles out is not the difficulty — close to none — but the absence of pressure: with no stopwatch running, you can try every combination without fear of spoiling anything. The same feeling runs through the verdict of a player who already owns several other works by the same creator and recognizes a style repeating itself across them: a flat zero hours on the profile, and a recommendation all the same, out of trust in what this creator tends to deliver.

Too short to count as a game

On the other side, the complaint lands on that same brevity, only stripped of its charm. A write-up from 2019 calls the game stupid and says it is not worth downloading. Another, from 2023, boils the experience down to one word: pointless — no story, no instructions, no challenge after the first click.

The same grievance runs across the years without changing its verb: boredom, or the comparison to a pretty but empty screensaver. One player suggests the right audience is children between two and four years old; another, writing in Spanish, sums up the challenge as something anybody would crack without the slightest effort. Time and again, the profile beside the verdict reads zero hours played: Steam's clock does not turn fast enough to register the visit.

The chair is still warm when it ends

The real dividing line does not run between the players who liked it and the players who did not — it runs through what a person expects a game to be. For anyone after a break with no demands attached, a pretty gap between heavier tasks, or a first go at a mouse for someone very small, the lost hats keep their promise in a handful of clicks and close up without a loose end. For anyone who sits down in search of a riddle, a story, or the slightest resistance from the game against the player, the visit is over while the chair is still warm, and the disappointment documented across years of write-ups proves that this does not shift. Mushroom Cats asks nobody for their time — only for the few clicks that Steam's clock fails to register; go in forewarned and you come away satisfied, go in expecting more and you leave behind the same old verdict.