Serena's Cozy Game Reviews: Scritchy Scratchy
DEVELOPER: Lunch Money Games
PUBLISHER: Funday Games
RELEASED: March 18, 2026
DATE OF REVIEW: June 12, 2026
CATEGORIES: Casual, Indie, Simulation
PLATFORMS: Steam, itch.io, Apple, Google Play
PRICE: $6.99
STEAM DECK COMPATIBILITY: Playable; I had to set up my own keybinds but other than that it worked perfectly.
ACCESSIBILITY: They have in-built an accessibility feature where you can click and hold and it scratches tickets for you instead of you having to move your mouse back and forth. This is great; I wouldn’t have been able to play without it! But I also wish they had something similar for machines you have to click multiple times to charge (like the egg timer), because clicking that over and over and over again was painful. On another note, though I’m not colorblind, each symbol was visually distinct enough without colors that I could see someone who has colorblindness might be able to still differentiate between them. That said, some symbols I think are intentionally made hard to differentiate; Scratch My Back’s plastic bag vs jellyfish, The Bomb’s red light vs purple light.
FINNICKINESS: At times navigating around symbols you did not want to uncover was nigh impossible, especially with the accessibility feature turned on. It would be nice if the scratching could start where the coin was for this reason, to avoid certain areas?
BUGGINESS: I encountered no bugs in my 12 hours. Yay!
FREE DEMO?: Yes! And the save carries over.
RECOMMEND/DO NOT RECOMMEND?: Recommend! 👍
IF YOU LIKE SCRITCHY SCRATCHY, YOU MIGHT LIKE: For more scratch-offs and way more idling and incrementals, try Scratchers (haven’t played, only watched videos of it). For more dead-end jobs, debt, and death, try Hardspace: Shipbreaker. For more simulation, pixel art, and cat companions, try Meowjiro.
Scritchy Scratchy is a incremental gambling rogue-lite game, and you may be thinking: wait, Serena, none of those words are in the Bible. By which you mean, of course, “that doesn’t really sound like cozy job sim or farming simulator to me”. Which, you know, is absolutely correct. In fact, if someone pitched to me to write my first cozy review on an incremental idler, I would’ve laughed loudly, politely declined, and gone about my day.
But Scritchy Scratchy is simply something special. Something that I would not have gotten to experience or would have given the chance had there not been a free demo up on Steam. I watched half of the video and got the vague picture of the game: you are a dishwasher at a non-descript restaurant, looking for a way out of your money problems, and are introduced through a strange call on the phone to give gambling a try. Your day job changes from scrubbing spaghetti plates clean to scratching tickets with your coin. I thought, What an interesting take on a job sim! And then I added the demo to the library without a second thought.
In general, I don’t tend to enjoy rogue-likes or -lites. I just don’t like resetting progress or feeling like I lost something. It’s very fortunate, indeed, that I didn’t read too much of the Steam page before giving Scritchy Scratchy a go.
As stated, you start at your day job, washing plates. It isn’t long before a call on the phone introduces you to Gambling(TM), and your character decides the $1 to $3 they’re getting per scrubbed plate isn’t putting food on the table, so they start scratching for gold. Very soon you’ll unlock upgrades, and they do make a difference. You can upgrade your luck, your coin’s size, and your coin to be of a stronger material to scratch more difficult coatings on future tickets. These are upgrades you can feel and see affecting your gameplay intimately, immediately. I never felt like I’d wasted money on an upgrade — I always instantly saw the effects of what I’d spent money on.
Soon you’re given the chance to buy things to help automate in the background. Scratch Bot can scratch tickets for you, albeit slowly (at first), but you still have to check each one individually, and load Scratch Bot one by one.
You’re introduced early on to tickets that you can lose money on if you reveal a certain symbol. Unlike other games that offers automation, Scritchy Scratchy early on encourages you to play the game in tandem with your automation. If you throw these tickets into Scratch Bot, you can end up losing money and having to take out a loan. This is a theme that I found even in its latest stage never fully changed. While at times Scritchy Scratchy can absolutely be a second monitor sort of game, there was really no point where I felt like I needed to walk away from or tab out of Scritchy Scratchy for minutes at a time. There was always something to do, if I wanted to, always something to keep me engaged.
And it’s fun, did I mention? Scratching your own cards, watching your money go up, making the decision of if you’re going to go for the Lucky Cat ticket yet or if your luck isn’t high enough to outweigh the chance of getting bogged down by the bad fishbones. You get to make decisions with your money, choose where and how and if to automate, and go for the jackpot (and the super jackpot)!
And then… the Final Chance appeared.
It was a golden ticket, a skull with a halo figure, one to rival all the tickets I’d had before. I saved up all the money I could, bought as many luck upgrades as I could manage before it felt it was getting to a wild degree, and then tried my luck at Final Chance.
And I failed. Three skulls on the ticket. An achievement popped up. I had died.
This is when I learned Scritchy Scratchy was a rogue-lite. My immediate reaction was something like, Oh. I don’t really like rogue-lites, in my head. I used my prestige points on what I felt would be helpful, but I wasn’t sure if I’d keep playing. I was back at the beginning. Washing dishes again. But over the next few days, I couldn’t get Scritchy Scratchy out of my head. The music. The fun I’d had. That strange voice on the telephone. The ticket that killed me. And I decided to pick up the full game and try again.
This time, I unlocked a new catalogue of tickets before I died. And so I did the next time. And the next time. Each time, I was able to unlock new cool gadgets, too. A fan to blow my tickets into my Scratch Bot. A sticky mat to hold back the ones I wanted to keep for myself. A night market to buy cosmetics for my table. A cat that helped me read my tickets. All of space and time in an egg timer, don’t worry about it. And I played. And I played. And I scratched. And Scratch Bot scratched. And Mundo (the cat) checked tickets and briefly bankrupted me and then checked more tickets. And I learned about new numbers I hadn’t known about before.
I’m not going to spoil the full game, or how it ends. I think you should see it for yourself, if you’re interested in Scritchy Scratchy at all. But I thought it was beautifully done, rather chilling, and so fascinating. It kept me hooked and interested the entire time. Simple enough to be a set piece, but complicated enough to give me goosebumps when the credits rolled and make me go… Wait. I want to see the other endings.
This is coming from someone who plays games with multiple branching endings and then doesn’t ever end up doing the other endings. (I’m so sorry, Kate Marsh.)
As much fun as I had with Scritchy Scratchy, though, this game is certainly not one with high replayability, and is about the amount of hours you can put into it. For me, that was 12. Once you know how you like to scratch tickets, and once you’ve gotten all of (or most of) the achievements… you’re done. Maybe now and again you’ll get the scratch for Scritchy Scratchy, but overall, once you’ve accomplished everything there is to accomplish, you’ve… accomplished everything there is to accomplish. But truly, I don’t think that’s an overwhelming issue. The game is $7 off sale (and I happened to snag it on sale). And you can reset your progress at any time, if you really want to do it all over again.
When I was in the throes of my Scritchy Scratchy addiction, however, I simply couldn’t get enough. I watched almost every video on Youtube about it. I played it over and over. I got my wife to play it. It’s so fun, watching people experience everything for the first time, traversing through the highs and the lows, seeing others bankrupt themselves and take loans and what-not. It truly is an enjoyable experience to find your way through and to watch others navigate through!
Though the introduction of luck in early games makes every run a different (and sometimes excitingly harrowing!) experience, the higher your prestige points, the harder it is to truly “fail” a run. This does lead into it being less replayable the longer you play. But as I said, I truly do not think that is a horrible thing.
All in all, Scritchy Scratchy is a wonderfully fun time that I enjoyed greatly for the time I got to play and experience it! I recommend it highly, with the understanding that you’ll get a lot of playtime, but it won’t be a game you’ll be playing for the rest of your life.
