Screenshot by Bonus Action
Management and simulation games have a tough set of requirements to beat thanks to numerous popular titles that have released over the past decade. Critter Café, with it’s bright colors and adorable concept, reaches high to meet many core mechanics of these games, but doesn’t quite manage to hit the mark.
Critter Café is, first and foremost, a café management sim. While it has both puzzles and critter-keeping mechanics, these fall decidedly second to the most important element of the game: decorating your shop and serving customers.
The game pulls players in with bright colors, a wide selection of decoration options, and the promise of a good gameplay loop. However, the bumps and hurdles come in what feels like unfinished gameplay elements, leaving players hungry for more than they can get from each portion of the title.
Key Details
- Developer: Sumo Digital
- Publisher: Secret Mode
- Platforms: PC via Steam, Nintendo Switch
- Price: $19.99
- Review Code Provided: Yes
A Never-Ending Tutorial
When jumping into a simulation title, mechanics can always be a bit of a learning curve. Critter Café tackles this via a string of tutorials worked into the main story objectives. These walkthroughs will teach you everything you need to know about running your shop, feeding the customers, finding critters, solving puzzles, and just about every other thing you may need.
While the initial handful of tutorials are extremely helpful, this mode of teaching players quickly becomes hand-holdy. Puzzles are never too hard, because the solution to getting through them is on a “how-to” sign at the start of a level. Cooking isn’t complex, as every mini-game for serving customers is explained via a series of breakdowns. Very little is left for players to discover, as most everything is explained within the first three hours of the game.
Because of this, I kept expecting to hit a point where the game would leave me to figure things out on my own, and I would then be able to discover more complex mechanics within the loop of serving customers and catching critters. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case, the game settles into a loop of the same tasks, repeated with minimal difficulty, as you collect critter types and furniture sets.
Critter Care Is A Point-And-Click Game
A Café meant to showcase critters wouldn’t be complete without a variety of adorable, fuzzy creatures to care for. In Critter Café, players obtain their mascots by going through rifts and solving puzzles. At the end of each puzzle, a new critter can be rescued.
After you’ve collected them, you will take them back to the shop, though they will live at a little sanctuary when not amusing customers. Critter care was one of the elements of the game I was most excited for. The opportunity to build a home for these little buddies to feed and groom them was meant to satisfy the hungry, Tamagotchi-obsessed monster that I will forever be.
This is why the actual mechanics of the game were so upsetting to me. You can’t decorate the sanctuary, or do anything to specifically spoil your critters. Instead, you can call them to you via a bell, and then through a point-and-click menu, select a handful of actions.
These don’t start minigames. Instead, if you throw the toy, your critter will run and grab it. If you choose to wash it, they’ll just stand and make a face while being automatically hosed down. No mud removal via a sponge. No little games to play to earn friendship points.
With so little reward or reason to go through this menu over and over, it quickly becomes a chore you have to complete to keep the critters happy. This was a big hit for me when trying to enjoy the game.
Short Shop Hours and Cinematic Bookings
Running your cafe is made up of two specific parts: serving customers and completing bookings. Shop hours are extremely short, giving you only a few minutes to rush frantically between customers as they demand coffee, cake, or the small selection of food that sits, pre-made, in the fridge. The latte art mini-game is the best of these order-fillers, but it also takes the longest to complete.
Because the shop hours are so short, the best option for setting up your café is to keep all the seating as close to the kitchen as possible. This means a large amount of space in your cafe will go unused. However, that isn’t so much of an issue when you realize you will constantly be redecorating the space for bookings.
A booking is a request put in by customers for a small group with specific requirements to rent the entire café. They might request a certain type of furniture, a specific color, or type of critter. Once you have all the requested requirements, you can confirm the booking.
However, instead of getting to see the guests in the café, or serve them, or engage in any way, a generic scene will replay showing a handful of random characters clapping for the selected critter. The lack of depth here was just as disappointing as with critter care.
Decorations For Days, But No Crafting
Critter Café did a good job building hype for the sheer amount of customization that would be possible while playing. Unfortunately, expanding the library of items players can use in their café is not particularly exciting.
Normally, I’d be fine without a crafting element or shop for blueprints, but with so little else in the player’s control, Critter Café really needed something that would allow players to feel a sense of progression. Unfortunately, furniture items are unlocked and auto-populated into your library of available items in build mode.
While colors can be changed on these items, there is very little way of customizing them outside of their placement in the shop.
Final Score – 6/10
Critter Café is a cute game, and if you are looking for something low-effort that passes the time, it’s not a bad option. It’s cute, requires very little from the player, and is enjoyable on a surface level.
However, if you are looking for a deep, engaging, addictive simulation and shop management game, it just doesn’t hit the mark. A lack of complex mechanics, purpose, and progression leaves gameplay hollow and may frustrate fans of titles like Moonlighter or Cuisineer. It’s definitely cute, it just needed more depth to keep players motivated.
**A Steam code of Critter Café was provided to Bonus Action for the purpose of this review**
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