Animal Spa Review (PC)

Between checking the weather for the umpteenth time and monitoring social media for plausible signs that Grand Theft Auto VI could still launch before 2026, I’m still opting for that alternate route—Animal Spa, the tab that sits at the bottom of my desktop and has absolutely no reason to ask anything more of me than to give a cute and pudgy panda a hot bath every once in a blue moon.

I’ve got a tremendous amount going on, and with roughly eighty percent of the monitor consuming itself with somewhere in the vicinity of twelve open tabs on Steam, a pop-up with eighteen unread Discord messages, and a minimized tab that routes back to an unfinished raid in World of Warcraft, I feel as if the simple act of bathing a panda (or an animal, in general) is the sort of respite that I could do with at this moment in time. It doesn’t ask much, Animal Spa — only that you, or in this case, I, cater to the taps, adjust the temperate as and when necessary, and watch over the critters as they go about their business while I procrastinate to keep a lid on my own private affairs. For something so trivial, I will gladly postpone an anniversary celebration or a biweekly social event. Don’t ask.

Of course, Animal Spa isn’t really a game-game, but a self-sustaining tab that acts on its own accord. It’s the sort of idle clicker that you don’t need any experience to understand. Animals roam at the bottom corner of your screen, and you, the lucky bathhouse keeper, get to make frequent upgrades, install thematic decor, and juggle the ledger with your usual administrative duties in tow. If that’s the sort of pop-up you wouldn’t mind installing, then read on for more.

Bathing in Task Bars

Animal Spa takes a leaf out of the traditional idle clicking game—the orbital plane that requires little to no effort to take advantage of. Aside from bathing the likes of portly pandas, fluffy hamsters, and floppy bunnies, you also have the responsibility of building your spa—a secondary attraction to the game that, while not exactly expansive, allows you the chance to install pixel-crafted plants, benches, and thermostat systems, to list just a few of its built-in catalog items. And with each customer that you successfully manage to satisfy, you can essentially earn more gold coins, allowing you to—you guessed it—purchase more items for your spa, unlock lo-fi beats, and attract a wider demographic to splash their cash on your services.

It goes without saying at this point, but Animal Spa isn’t an emotionally taxing experience. In fact, it aims to capitalize on the other end of the field, with most of its gameplay being centered around frequent clicking, and witnessing the gradual ascension of a small bathhouse as it transforms into a bustling communal hub for animals of all shapes and sizes. As such, it doesn’t offer a huge amount of gameplay for you to carve at with a hammer and chisel — at least not in the traditional sense, anyway. But then, that isn’t an uncommon thing for this kind of experience.

Snowballing

There isn’t a challenge here, so to speak, though there are several areas that require your attention, like stock checking, staff management, vendor placement, and temperature monitoring, for example. For the most part, though, Animal Spa more or less unfolds in its own time, leaving you to ponder the remaining tasks on your desktop while the bathhouse builds itself from the ground up. Simply put, once you set the correct temperature—cold, warm, or hot—the rest of the world effectively follows a linear cycle, with animals frequenting the tub and the installations that you place in the bathhouse, be it a vending machine for quick snacks or a convenient stall for fresh cups of boba tea and milk.

While the gameplay isn’t what you would describe as in-depth, the pixel art style that Animal Spa brings to the table is something to write home about. Minced with a pleasant and elegantly charming, albeit slightly childish soundtrack, the game manages to establish itself as an irresistibly wholesome experience. I can’t say that it’s a game game, but that doesn’t mean that it’s any less of a sight for sore eyes. It’s cute, palatable, and absolutely teeming with its own brand of humor that’ll make the lack of interactivity all the more soothing for the short stint you’ll spend with it.

Verdict

Given the fact that Animal Spa harbors its entire base of operations on a bite-sized portion of your screen, it isn’t as if you need to fret about losing your time to the monotonous nature or nurturing zoo animals with endless opportunities to slump themselves into piping hot baths. The simple truth here is that, while there are several interactive areas for you to plug away at, the lion’s share of the “game” more or less moves on without you, meaning, you don’t need to give it any more attention than it deserves. And with no penalty for neglecting the animals or avoiding their primal urges to soak in natural spring water, you could, in all honesty, leave Animal Spa to sit on your desktop and still reap all of the same benefits.

Animal Spa isn’t a game, so you might as well dilute the idea of having an intricate zoo-keeping simulation game à la Planet Zoo on your hands before adding it to your wishlist. Alas, this is more of a background screensaver, if anything, and so, if you can bypass the fact that you probably won’t be spending dozens of hours finessing the bathhouse formula or critically analyzing the temperature of the bath water itself, then you should have no qualms with the thought of stapling it to your desktop to let it evolve on its own terms. Like I said, it won’t consume your entire day, but it will add a few wholesome embellishments to the existing desktop environment. Can’t complain about that.