What is it:
Lovot and Neko Donut Room are two free web games with interfaces simple enough for young kids to use, but with puzzle-solving sophisticated enough for older kids to enjoy.
Who is it for:
Lovot and Neko Donut Room are for just about anyone (adults included) who enjoy quick little online games. There are very few such games that appeal to young kids, but our five-year-old loved them and was able to beat them (with a little help), and then wanted to play them again from the beginning.
What Kids Like:
The interfaces are cute and the gameplay is simple, but at the same time are full of discovery. You don’t know exactly what you’re supposed to do, but have to figure it out as you go, and that kind of discovery is very satisfying.
What Parents Like:
They are both fun games (even for me) and have zero of the negative elements often found in games. Most web games seem to be made by young men obsessed with revenge fantasies, and so the games have themes of conflict, violence, and domination. It’s refreshing to have games like Neko Donut Room and Lovot, with themes of love, helping others, discovery, etc.
PBS Kids is a wonderful, free resource with hundreds of videos and games. But a (slight) problem with those games is that the educational value often comes before the entertainment value, and so some of their games aren’t fun enough to continue playing. Not so with this game.
What the Critics Think:
Bart Bonte’s site has some user reviews (and playing tips) for Neko Donut Room and Lovot
Who Made it:
Neko Donut is a Japanese game developer [twitter link] with (as far as I can tell) these two games, both made in 2021.
Neko Donut also has a new one, called simply Room
(There is also another game, Cat in Two, which is not quite as polished as the others.
Where Can I Get it:
Both games are available at unityroom.com, a Japanese collection of web games coded in Unity, which has become the de facto replacement for Flash.