Recent reviews by Mayo

The UI is terrible, the features are confusing and sometimes not explained very well (or at all), trying to resize the window in settings can lead to issues with displaying tooltips or menus, and I'm sure there's more things I'll run into that'll be a bummer. Yet this is still one of the more unique idlers out there and very satisfying when it does work.

After some tweaking in the settings I was able to get my party of 3 automatically progressing entirely on their own, and when they get stuck on a level I can go set them to grind a previous level over and over until I tell them otherwise. Every hour or so I check my inventory and go through all the loot they've collected, selling the trash and equipping the good gear (or just holding onto gear I wanna use later). When I feel overwhelmed or just bored, I watch them battle monsters or read what they're up to while resting after a level.

It's chill fun to check up on every now and then, especially if you're into collecting gear and equipping your party with the best stuff for their class. It's a shame the gear doesn't change a characters appearance, but this game provides something I have yet to find elsewhere.

Oh, and those issues I listed at the beginning of the review? Developers state that they're working on fixing all of those issues in the future, and updates are pretty frequent. Worth the asking price without a doubt.

Lovely little cafe that sits at the bottom of your screen. You can shrink it down or make it cover roughly half of the screen. Customization is simple but cute, progression is slow but that's somewhat expected with idlers, honestly my only real complaint is that it's a bit resource heavy for an idler. If there was offline progression it wouldn't be an issue, but sadly that isn't a feature.

There's tons of recipes to unlock and the vibe is adorable, so it's still worth the $9 asking price. If you have a decent PC or you don't plan on running anything resource heavy with this in the background, you'll find this cute little cafe to be a lovely part of your day.

(also pls let us customize what customers enter our restaurants, I want all frogs)

UPDATE: I noticed there's a huge lack of QOL features which you should know about if you're not obsessed with the idea of this tiny cafe sitting on your desktop. Going through the UI can be a pain, sorting through your recipes is odd and frustrating with the limited filters, setting up your kitchen is the worst if you want to serve specific things on the menu (you have to see each individual recipe to see what cooking station it needs and adjust accordingly, or risk having chefs waiting for a station to free up to cook another order), you can't flip decoration items which results in more limited decorating and an ugly kitchen if you want to put anything on the bottom, you can't have presets for your decorations (lets say you want a donut store kinda theme selling just donuts and coffee with a diner that reflects that, but later wanna switch to a fancy 5 star theme with a menu thats full of fancy foods, you can't do that without setting it all up yourself which can take forever), there's probably more I'm forgetting but they're absolutely noticeable.

None of these issues are enough to avoid this game imo, it's just pretty disappointing. It's still one of a kind and super fun. However I'd maybe recommend getting it on a sale if you aren't in love with the screenshots and features listed on the store page. $5 or less would be ideal.

An amazing idea with an awesome feature, the ability to make your own computer assistant with no coding experience needed. The main target audience is obviously furries, and PAIcom will most likely turn away people who aren't into the fandom due to his jokes and general quirks, but even if you aren't a fan of PAIcom himself this is still worth picking up for the easy modding capabilities.

I haven't messed with all of PAIcom's commands yet, as I'm working on my own computer assistant via the easy to understand guide to modding PAIcom, but he's very useful. Some of his dialogue goes on way too long (I think there's a command to make him stop talking mid-reply) and a lot of the humor got stale fast when I realized how often he repeats the same reply to commands, but the effort put into this really shows. The steam workshop isn't too lively just yet, but hopefully when enough people discover this gem they'll add their creations to the workshop.

Well worth the $5, and apparently it's free off github or something like that if you don't mind not having access to the steam workshop / supporting this amazing idea.

While it's free, you need to pay for the characters if you don't want the base anime girl character. Compared to its rival game, MateEngine, it does lack a lot of customization and features. However, Desktop Mate has it's unique charms that make it worth it in my eyes.

You can shrink down your desktop friend or increase their size, far more drastically than MateEngine allows you to do. Your lil friend can hop from one window to the other, and dynamically change animations when sitting on windows or the taskbar (even if it is limited to a handful of animations). Many characters have unique animations and each has a unique voice, the newest character "Work Cat" does a little point animation when using the save hotkey (CTRL+S) and gives a cute voice-line to let you know whatever you were trying to save has been saved.

It's pretty pricey for each character, but if you watch the trailers and look into their features you can see how much effort and care has been put into each one. There are some great mods that were made back before modding support was removed, but you can roll back to an older build and the mods will work. Whether you pay for the characters, stick with the base anime girl, or roll back and use mods, you'll find a lot of things unique only to Desktop Mate (at least for now, who knows what MateEngine will cook up in the future).

I'd recommend trying out both Desktop Mate and MateEngine (there's a free version available) before purchasing anything. I use both of them, have bought MateEngine on Steam and purchased a DLC for Desktop Mate. While the latter has less features for higher costs, I found myself more attached to my little cat friend from Desktop Mate than my more feature heavy Kermit the Frog through MateEngine. No hate on MateEngine though, it's truly amazing and worth getting if Desktop Mate interests you or seems too lacking for your tastes.

probably the most feature heavy desktop pet out there, especially when you toss in mods

It's Taletell, of course your choices don't matter. There is only one choice in the entire game that matters, everything else just adds flavor cutscenes, dialogue, or text. Never longer than 10-20 seconds too.

If the story interests you it's worth it, gameplay wise there's 0 consequence to how good or bad you do at the dispatch part of the "game". It's still an amazing story, but it's not a game. Don't tell me there's replayability either because there isn't, unless you wanna get all the achievements or sit through the same story for a few unseen flavor cutscenes.

Perfect for fans of the Papa's franchise who want something very light to visit every now and then. There isn't a load of features, but that's the point. You can close up shop when you're feeling burnt out from serving customers and open up the restaurant when you're ready to take more orders, set when you want your next customer to show up if you want a set time to do other things, or try out a hectic mode where you get a constant flow of customers and get poor ratings for taking too long to serve them.

Unless a customer says they don't want a certain ingredient, you can add on every other ingredient to a customers burger if you'd like. If you get mad at a customer, you can cook up exactly what they asked for and throw it at them, then close up shop until they realize that unless they wanna eat off the ground they need to come back later. If you want skeletons, pumpkin people, and other spooky customers, you can grab the DLC and get a whole new look to the entire game.

It's one of the more unique desktop idlers / pets, and it was more than worth the $5.

For the love of god don't equip the Ropuka skin if you have that game. Absolute nightmare fuel.

Awesome game btw, but requires you to be a bit active as the bug box gets full fast and you have to manually empty it every time to allow your spider (or frog mutant) to catch more bugs. I'd say that's a downside, but with how quickly coins stack up it creates a balance of sorts with progression. You can also leave the bug box full to let your spider sleep for longer than a few seconds.

Adorable idea and doesn't get in the way when you're doing other stuff. Very customizable too.

The best idler out there. Only issue I have is that you cant shrink the window while keeping a good resolution like with other idlers. If you like big numbers, cute bugs that don't ever look horrifying, and decorating stuff, then you'll love this game.