Critter Box isn't really a proper game, it's just a lazy 2D browser/Flash-tier "number incrementer" game where the object of the game is to increase the in-game currency by clicking, and sometimes buying things that increase the rate at which your currency/score goes up. It's an incredibly shallow game loop, to the point you might as well just run a program that does "i=i+1; print i" and watch the numbers go up automatically, and just watch it. You'd get the exact same outcome. If this sounds completely mindless, you're not wrong.
That should be qualified a bit... this is in fact worse than a clicker because you can't click, you just have to idle (10 crappy coins per minute to start with). All you can do with the coins is buy garbage cosmetics. To help understand why this complete crap is on Steam, it's worth noting the developer is branching out (badly) to a new genre here... they are more famous for writing non-game garbage and publishing it on Steam. Well, I guess this barely counts as a game, too. The developer instead is infamous for writing pukeworthy LGBTQIA+ erotic fan-fiction e-books about his imaginary boyfriend, who is also his pet dog. Yes, you read that right.
Noah, get the boat.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
The visuals in this game are a complete joke, it's seriously just a bunch of MS-Paint sprites/images that look like they were lazily scrawled out over the space of a couple of hours. Like, with the mouse, it doesn't look like they even used a Wacom tablet or anything. It's so bad even pixel "art" would look better than this. Pure MSPaint. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget to arrange someone who can create graphical assets properly, or lack of talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low, enough on its own to deter gamers.
There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.
The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just point and click stuff like a browser/Flash game. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here.
The very poor quality of this game puts it squarely on-par with ancient 1990's Flash/Java games, and given it's 2026 (and this was released not so far back in 2026), gamers and the industry expect and deserve better than this kind of low effort shovelware.
Those technical issues put this game beneath what is expected from a contemporary, professionally developed PC game.
The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was
only 2 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 130 million gamers on Steam and well over 140,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 140,000+ games on Steam?
Critter Box has the greedy, cash grab price of around $5 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam.
For comparison, the $5 asking price for this game could get you games like "Killing Floor", "Civilization VI" or "Fallout: New Vegas". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.
Profile Features Limited!
Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.
