As reflected by my 2025 Steam Replay, I poured a lot of time into Bongo Cat last year. So when someone said, ‘What if Bongo Cat, with knives,’ you best believe I was intrigued. That is, essentially, the premise for Tap Tap Loot, a cute and significantly more violent clicker game that’s rolled out a demo for the Steam Next Fest.
Like Bongo Cat, Tap Tap Loot drops a cute little kitty in the corner of your screen, where he sits waiting to react to your keystrokes. Instead of just happily bap-bap-bapping away on your taskbar, though, he marches into battle against an endless (but politely single-file) onslaught of enemy creatures. Killing monsters earns XP, advancing your level and opening the door to better and more powerful weapons and equipment, which you’ll pick up automatically as you go.
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You’ll need the better stuff (and various powers and buffs they provide) because Double Tap (which is what I’ve named him, because he’s my cat and I can do what I want) is somewhat fragile, and will die many times over as you hammer away on your Excel spreadsheet or whatever. Luckily, while most cats have nine lives, Double Cat’s appear to be limitless, as death is followed by a quick bounceback and restart, with no equipment lost.
Here’s Double Tap at level 21, leading a couple pals in a fight against pugilist cacti beneath the UI, which is usually closed and off the screen:
The full version of Tap Tap Loot promises more than 300 unique items to collect over five different biomes, and co-op multiplayer for up to four people, which sounds like fun: The more the merrier, and it’s also a way to keep your cat advancing through the ranks even if you have to go do something else for a while.
Multiplayer is supported in the demo, as seen above, but several other features, including a statistics and “collection” page (which I assume will be to show off all the sweet loot you’ve picked up over the course of your adventures) are not. The interface doesn’t automatically scale either, so by default it stretches outside the borders of my vertically-aligned monitor: It’s manually adjustable in the display settings, but you’ll need to do a bit of futzing around if you’re switching it between monitors.
Tap Tap Loot is a more involved clicker experience than Bongo Cat. Instead of just cute hats, it features an RPG-style paper doll inventory, and each item is upgradeable with currency earned by adventuring and sell off extra items. It’s obviously not the next coming of Ultima, and you can safely ignore it if you just like having a little cat rumbling across the bottom of your screen getting his ass kicked every now and then, but it’s clearly designed to be more “engaging” than pure clickers.
For myself, I think I prefer the simpler approach. It’s a lot of responsibility, knowing that Double Tap is relying on me to keep him alive and swinging, and it’s distracting. I don’t have to keep checking in to ensure he’s packing the best possible arms and armor as he mows down hordes of enemies, but… I kind of do have to, you know? Bongo Cat, meanwhile, just wants to hang out and look good. It’s far less stressful.
It gave me a thought, though. What if it didn’t fall to me to take care of Double Tap? What if, instead, he was being watched over by some sort of omniscient deity, a sort of all-powerful eye in the sky? And thus, behold: The Great and Terrible Bongos, All-Powerful Bapper of the Cosmic Catbox! He sees all, he knows all, he does… well, nothing, really. He’s not going to babysit your guy. But yeah, it works!
Say a prayer for my 2026 Steam Replay.
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