Bao Bao's™ Cozy Laundromat

this is a very cute idle game to leave in the background and overall is worth the $5 for that alone, however, the UI, progression and bugs are rage-inducing and kind of override the fun. if you're looking for an idle game you can kind of play, then i would not recommend this. i will say i really love the graphics, assets and animations, they are very cute - the little fans, the pandas slurping noodles, the cats scratching at machines, and even just the washing machines working away are adorable. but other than that... to make money you need more workers. the amount of washing machines and stuff you have doesn't really matter until you get more workers, but workers cost thousands so you have to leave the game idle for like 20 hours before you can start to even imagine making more money. then you need to buy items to unlock the next tier/upgrade (the money increase between upgrades is abyssmal btw...) so there's alot of shuffling around that needs to be done quite frequently and doing that is REALLY buggy. like i can generally tolerate bugs but damn... sometimes you can't delete furniture unless you save, quit and reopen the game. if you go to edit mode and move an object, the move menu disappears from the item until you exit and re-enter edit mode, so if you need to move one item multiple times it ends up being a pain.. and there's not a lot of room to move or decorate. even expanding the shop is not rewarding because (a) you unlock maybe 4 extra tiles, great and (b) you can still place things in areas you havent formally expanded either way. speaking of decoration, decor items give no reward and are purely for aesthetics - for example i thought maybe putting fans in would increase customer satisfaction/money or something but there are no customers in your shop. it's just an endless animation cycle of your workers picking up clothes from a basket that's never empty. and the event decoration items (christmas, etc) are really overpriced and don't give much reward either. the game also doesn't autosave either very often, so if you don't press the save button before you close it down, you can lose heaps of progress - learnt that the hard way after reshuffling the entire laundromat. usually there's not much to say about an idle game because there's not much gameplay, but even the minimal gameplay involved in this game makes me angry at times lol. so... probably not a relaxing idle game. but i guess cute and worth $5 nonetheless if you really do just leave it idle.