Bongo Cat Review

Born from an internet meme, developers Marcel Curawka and Julius Krüger, alongside publisher Irox Games, launched Bongo Cat. This Steam free-to-play title invites a feline companion to your desktop, which will bong alongside every interaction with the computer: keyboard presses, mouse clicks, and (when in Gaming Mode) even controller buttons.

This simple title follows the Steam Community Market slop trend set forth by its predecessor, Banana, which invited gamers to click on the fruit to get unique items to sell on the Steam market. Previously, it accrued hundreds of thousands of players, but the banana reign soon came to a close when the game wasn't introducing more outside of that.

Bongo Cat took a different approach to this trend, instead offering cosmetic items to decorate the furry (or sometimes furry — we’ll get into it) friend with the drops. Every 30 minutes, the game allows the opportunity to spend 1,000 bongos to get an item of varying rarities to change the cat’s skin and hat.

The rarities include Common (with a 90% chance of dropping), Uncommon (9.5%), Rare (0.49%), Epic (0.01%), and Legendary (which is one in 500,000, or 0.0002% chance to drop). Each rarity can be upgraded by sacrificing 10 of the previous item to the next rarity, meaning that through enough grinding (read: bonging), getting a Legendary is possible, regardless of ludicrous chances.

At its core, Bongo Cat still remains a Steam Community Market slop game, so one of the main purposes is to acquire enough items to sell for respective prices to slowly, yet surely, get enough money to buy something. This is one of the allures, as the Legendary items can cost quite a hefty amount… if you’re lucky (or patient) enough to get one.

While that's the main purpose I'd wager most of the users are utilising Bongo Cat for, I've opted to just play the game by enjoying the customisation options presented to me by my feline friend. After all, getting one Legendary requires either extreme luck (one in 500,000 equates to about 250,000 hours of play) or patience (you need 10,000 Commons for one Legendary, or about 5,000 hours).

Accepting the inevitable fate of never being able to earn much of a buck in Bongo Cat unlocks the better use of the game (depending on your personal preferences, of course): inviting a new companion to your desktop. The cat joins in on work, gleefully bonging with each interaction of the PC. The counter continues endlessly up, which means that inevitably, I eventually had enough points that paying 1,000 bongos for a cosmetic became inconsequential (at the time of writing, I have 4,810,120 bongos saved up).

Each rarity has a variety of items, starting from very basic to quite dauntingly cat-changing, and depending on your personal preferences and likes, you might be able to create a perfect cat in no time. The game offers 92 Common items, 71 Uncommon items, 54 Rare items, 38 Epic items, and 19 Legendary items to acquire, and mixing and matching offers a great opportunity to create a perfect cat for every mood.

Accepting that Bongo Cat is more of a long-haul game rewards the player with an excess of cosmetics and bongos to spend, and the next-to-none performance that the game takes upon rigs makes it easy to just let it auto-run in the background while doing something else. With 1,400 hours of playtime already, I've spent a fair bit of time with my companion, accompanying me through gaming, work, and leisure time, and I've amassed quite a large collection of items that let me create a unique cat for pretty much every mood (like my gay purr-ade variaton below).

The cat’s customisation is pretty substantial, and this is where it also being able to be a “not furry” comes into play. There’s a dragon skin (we see you, scaleys), a Sun skin, a dog skin, sand… The capabilities to change how the cat looks are pretty substantial, and that’s without considering the hats that you can also acquire.

Bongo Catis isn’t just a friend to tag along in your journeys, however, as the team knows they’ve hit gold with their Overwhelmingly Positive title. The game has received numerous content updates, including — unfortunately — FOMO-based events, which bring time-limited cosmetics only acquirable for that specific timeframe.

While it's an incredible money-making machine to acquire these unique items, it means that arriving late, you might have already missed the April Fools' and Summer events, with no information on whether these will ever return, or whether their prices will soar sky-high. I've opted to save all of my cosmetics, comprised of a few hundred Commons and a couple dozen Uncommons, for the Halloween event to see if I can accrue enough to get one Legendary item.

The odds are definitely stacked against the player, as each Event drops two hats and two cats for each rarity (for a total of 20 new cosmetics), meaning it’s impossible to have enough to get everything. But outside of the FOMO events, Bongo Cat has received a surprisingly enjoyable multiplayer experience, allowing for the opportunity to invite up to 100 friends to join via code. This comes with live bonging, cat changing, and even the capability to meow at them in different languages.

The quality-of-life features are aplenty, as Bongo Cat also now has saved presets (for when I want to change into an angry cat or outside of my dragon princess into something like a goblin with a butterfly on its head), and even a randomiser that chooses from all of my items. There’s an option to Favorite specific cosmetics, which the randomiser can be toggled to prefer, meaning the cat changes from all of the cosmetics I liked the most, keeping it fresh every few minutes.

While it's unfortunate that Bongo Cat has delved into the most predatory of mechanics to ensure a buck, it keeps the market competitive for those who wish to use it for this purpose strictly. And in the meantime, those who love cosmetics either will find a slew of amazing ones to decorate with, or will have to fork over a bit of money for the rarest ones. For a free-to-play title, if you care about your feline enough, that's not a ludicrous ask, depending on the price.