One game that I often come back to is called Cats & Soup, a relaxing game by hidea. In this game, you have a colony of cats that perform different jobs such as carrot cutting, corn shucking, fishing, cooking, etc to create different soups. This is an incremental game, similar to clicker games where most of the gameplay is idle, and the player is just watching over their colony and leveling up their cats.
The 2 biggest core aesthetics that I picked up from Cats & Soup are sense pleasure (sensation) and abnegation (submission). The muted colors, simple but satisfying animations, calming music, and sound effects of nature provide visual and audio sensation. These mechanics differ from the bright, overwhelming, or loud sounds of other incremental games such as Cookie Clickers, creating a different aesthetic of sense pleasure. The extremely simple clicking mechanic, lack of any leaderboards, and lack of any time constraint help shape the abnegation aesthetic. Cats & Soup is a game that can be picked up once a day or once a year, for an hour or for 1 minute.
Apart from these aesthetics, there are a couple more that appear as well, to a lesser degree. The number of different breeds of cats that are able to be collected and the various roles they can take on in the colony create a discovery aesthetic, as I often try to collect new types of cats and assign cats new roles. There are also mechanics that allow players to name the cats, customize them in accessories, and decorate a “cat tower” that houses them. These mechanics create an expression aesthetic.
