Of course I had to play a game that focuses on running a cat cafe. That’s a no-brainer. The gameplay is simple and the story doesn’t do anything out of the ordinary. The writing can be funny at times, which goes a fairly long way in a game that can be quite repetitive. I can see playing it again to experiment more with the various style and decor options that are available for customizing your cafe. But first, cats!
You start with the inheritance of some land in a small town where your grandmother once lived. She was a cat lover and you are in charge of creating a cafe that caters to cats and also humans as a way of honoring her memory. Also, a grimalkin appears in a cat shrine near town and asks you to help restore this sacred clearing to its former glory. There are four statues in the shrine and if you thought maybe each of these would correspond to an area of the cafe that you can improve, you would be correct. When you earn “delight” points for meeting your customers’ needs, you can improve your cafe’s furniture, staffing level, menu, or style and decor. You can switch freely between these branching skill paths at any time, which allows for a great deal of customization as you work to make your grandma proud.
How you please your customers is simple: serve them the food or drink they want, talk to them, and allow them to play with certain cats. Each type of person has a different stereotyped personality and diet. The vagabonds enjoy water and sandwiches, the artists enjoy coffee and sweets, the punks like milkshakes and vegetables, the witches like tea and platters, the fisherfolk like cola and soups, and the tech bros like their fancy coffee drinks and complicated sandwiches. There’s more variety than that, but you get the point. Some cats appeal to these personalities more than others, so when the cats appear as strays by your front door, you can decide which ones to adopt.
At first, you’ll only have enough money to acquire a sink and serve water to vagabonds, but as the days go by and word of mouth spreads, you will be able to get a variety of appliances and ingredients to attract a wider variety of customers. Somehow, there’s no need for a dish machine… I said money above, but it’s a variety of objects that you trade to shop-owners in town. Each store takes a different kind of currency and each type of customer rewards you with one of those currencies. Gold, gems, materials, fish, and timber rule everything around me.
What it means for you as a proprietor is that you will have to direct your attention to punks if you want to expand the physical footprint of your cafe because they are the ones who pay in construction materials. Want to improve your menu? Better advertise to the witches who will pay you in gems that you can pay to the fisherman who runs the dry goods store so you have the recipes and ingredients you’ll need. There’s a constant process of seeking to balance the needs of the different customer types with your overall goals for your cafe. There were definitely times when I stopped advertising to some of my clientele because I didn’t need any more of their form of payment. I needed more recipes and more furniture, so it was all witches and tech bros for a good while in the mid-game.
You’ll be chasing the feeling of stasis every few days when it seems like you’ve struck equilibrium between the size of your cafe, the customers who arrive, the cats you have, the food you offer, and the workers you manage. In this way, the game has a compelling cycle. The game-days fly by quickly and any feeling of letting down your customers will soon pass. Each day, you can see your customers’ satisfaction levels, conveyed by a smiley face. You’ll also get a letter grade ranking based on what I am assuming is an average of their overall satisfaction.
If this process all sounds rather faceless and plain, then you need to consider that the larger point of the game is that you can adopt cats. I mean it’s right there in the title, so I don’t want to belabor it. You can eventually have up to nine different cats in your cafe at once. You may also have had others pass through on their way to a forever home out in the community. I think I fostered close to 15 cats in my time with the game. As mentioned previously, each cat has its own traits and skills (playfulness, bladder control, messiness, etc.) that will make it a good fit (or not) for what you are trying to achieve in your cafe. Late in the game, you will get certain lures to place in the strays’ food bowl that will attract special cats with unique attributes. I had a hard time deciding whether to keep these clearly beneficial bonus cats or part with the first few cats I’d adopted (and named after some of the actual cats in my life).
Unfortunately, these cats cannot talk to you. Only the grimalkin speaks, and only at specified points in the narrative. Otherwise, you can see how the story of the small town (and your cafe’s role in it) plays out by interacting with a few regulars. There are five specific visitors who are special enough to get a name and an avatar. As you get to know Bonner and Arwel and Mateo and Carla-lala and Finley, you will see how they may already have existing relationships that you are joining. Some of the fun in the writing shows up here. You get to choose how to support Finley in her music career and how to advise Bonner in a conflict (based on a simple misunderstanding) with his husband. Finley has a great line in comparing music to sauce that goes on the rice that is your brain. Music is amazing in that way, and it’s nice to share that moment with Finley. Arwel has a brusque personality fitting his punk personality but can also quip Dad jokes with the best of them, such as when he asks, “Which smart-ass decided the word litter should refer both to the thing they poop in and their kids?” I laughed.
I’ll be coming back to this game again for sure. I was so focused on foods in my original playthrough that I didn’t do a lot of intentional decorating. I am thinking of making different sections or rooms for each kind of customer, just to see how that goes. If there are any updates to the game, it would be nice to give your employees a place to sleep. You can purchase cat beds, litter boxes, and food bowls that your cats can use throughout the day and night. But, each night at 7:00 when the customers leave, your workers just stand around with vacant stares. They should be allowed to go home and rest! Or, if this is some kind of cult-like cat cafe where they spend the night at work after their shift, I will need to obtain beds for them. They can already make use of the food they prepare or the toilets I’ve installed. If the developer’s goal was to highlight the exploitation of restaurant work, then they certainly succeeded. Somehow I don’t think it was, and that nagging thought took me out of the pure joy of building a cute place for cats and humans to socialize each other.
YOU MAY ALSO ENJOY THESE REVIEWS: