The genre reassures you. This one does not.
Nearly every incremental game is a promise that the line goes up. Numbers accumulate, resets are profitable, and a bad decision costs you time rather than anything you already had. Kittens Game is built the other way round, and that is why the usual recommendations bounce off it.
A game day is two seconds and a year is four hundred days, so a full cycle of seasons passes in about thirteen minutes. Catnip fields yield half again as much in spring and roughly a quarter of normal in winter, and from the fourth year a season can roll warm or cold on top of that, with no warning about which. Every kitten eats. So the classic first death is not a wall you cannot break, it is a player who doubled their population during a good autumn and watched half the village starve in the winter that followed. There are achievements for ten of your cats starving, and for a hundred.
What you liked, then, is that growth is a cost before it is an income, and that restraint is a skill the game actually tests. Sort recommendations by that and the list changes completely.
A Dark Room
A Dark Room by Michael Townsend is free in the browser and takes most people around three hours, and it is the purest short version of this feeling. You are cold, you are short of wood, and the moment the fire is stable the game finds something else to be short of. A thin food supply is the commonest reason a run stalls, and when the game sends you out of the village, running out of supplies away from home is not a soft failure that costs you a few minutes.
The honest gap is scale. Kittens Game is a save you keep for months and A Dark Room is one evening with an ending. Take it as a concentrated dose of the same pressure, not a replacement.
Evolve Idle
Evolve Idle is a free browser incremental that runs a species from single cells up through a civilisation and out into space, and it is the closest structural match to Kittens Game we know of. Population is fed rather than free, morale is a real number you can lose, and the environment your species landed in sets constraints the whole run has to work around. The species choice at the start is the part that carries: a photosynthesising race has a different food problem from a carnivorous one, small races need less housing and produce less, and some cannot use certain buildings at all. It then resets the planet on several different terms, each changing what the following run is allowed to do.
If the Kittens Game loop you enjoyed was reading a research tree while quietly worrying about the food column, this is the game to try next.
Trimps punishes you, but not like this
Trimps will take a similar number of months and it is at least as fiddly, and it is worth being precise about why it is only a partial answer. Trimps does punish overreach. Your army walks into a zone one cell at a time and simply stops when it cannot out-damage what is in front of it, and pushing too far means a stalled run.
But nothing is ever taken away from you. A bad Trimps run costs time and only time, the Helium you banked stays banked, and no number on the screen goes down because you were careless a season ago. There is no equivalent of a winter arriving to collect. If the thing you wanted back was the threat, Trimps substitutes a wall for it, which is a different and much gentler feeling. It is free in the browser, free on Steam, and desktop only.
Two partial matches
Melvor Idle matches Kittens Game on breadth and on the relationship with a save file, twenty-four skills feeding each other and a character you keep indefinitely. It costs $9.99 on Steam with a free version to try. What it does not have is a downside anywhere. Nothing rots, nothing starves, no season takes production away, and no reset ever asks you to give something up. It is the comfortable version of the same shape.
Progress Knight has one mechanic worth naming here, even though it is otherwise nothing like Kittens Game. Its shop items charge coins every single day, so a house you cannot really afford quietly bleeds a whole life dry, and under-buying your housing is the standard advice. That is a small, sharp version of the Kittens Game lesson about building capacity you cannot feed. The rest of it, one character, a career ladder, seventy years and a rebirth, is a different game entirely, and a much shorter one.
What is not like this at all
Antimatter Dimensions is excellent and it is the standard recommendation for anyone who liked anything in this genre, which is exactly why it lands here. It has no scarcity of any kind. There is one currency, it only goes up, resets are always profitable, and there is nothing to run out of. Somebody who came to Kittens Game for the seasonal squeeze will find nothing in it that resembles that at all.
Synergism and Clicker Heroes fail the same test for the same reason. They are number games where the number is never in danger.
Where to start
Evolve Idle, if you want the same game at a different scale and you are willing to read a research tree. A Dark Room if you have one evening and want the feeling rather than the commitment. And if what you actually want is more Kittens Game, its own challenge list is the answer nobody mentions: Winter Is Coming, Anarchy, Atheism and 1000 Years are handicaps that reshape a run and each pays out permanently.