Capcom Releases Neco Drop for April Fools, a Cat-Themed Street Fighter Puzzle Game

Yesterday, Capcom stated that they would be holding off on April Fools jokes, to try and genuinely help people out with the COVID-19 pandemic continuing. Today, they made good on that promise, releasing a full game with Street Fighter characters as cats.

The game is called Neco Drop, and it's out right now. You can use this link to play the game, and Neco Drop can either be played through your phone or on your computer. There's no app version of the game on phones mind you, so you'll need to play it through your browser.

Neco Drop functions as a Candy Crush-like game. You tap on a cat to play their corresponding level, in which you need to link up as many matching color blocks next to each other as possible, in order to build up energy and conquer a level.

After beating the level of a cat, you get to befriend them. You can feed them delicious treats, at which point Neco Drop basically becomes a game of collecting all the cats in the Encyclopedia. Each of the cats is modeled after Street Fighter 5 characters, from Ryu's headband and R. Mika's mask to an adorable cat with Akuma's, er, mane?

At the time of writing, there haven't actually been that many April Fools pranks in the gaming industry today (although that could change very quickly). Overwatch has put googly eyes onto all its characters, and one Apex Legends dev has been teasing some sort of April Fools-related content for their game.

Hats off to Capcom though. Releasing a simple free-to-play game for anyone to take part in, especially while everyone's stuck at home during at the moment, is a class act.