Get out of my kitchen!
If you don’t know, a cat cafe is a type of themed cafe popular in East Asia in which the establishment is both run and infiltrated by cats. Personally, I often go to a board game cafe to read a light book, because I like making friends with board games more than cats.
Cat Cafe Manager is a game that depicts the horrors of working in the food service industry under the iron paws of a team of cats. It describes it in the most interesting way possible, but don’t be fooled. This is hell.
Just race. Truth, I don’t hate cats. I like them better than humans.
Cat Cafe Manager (computer, Nintendo Switch [Reviewed])
Developer: Root Games
Publisher: Free Games
Released: April 14, 2022
MSRP: $19.99
Cat Cafe Manager puts you in the role of a vampire who decides to take over their grandmother’s business. However, the business doesn’t exist anymore and I can’t remember if it was ever explained about what happened to your grandmother. So you have to build it from scratch, then attract local strays into it. I’m not joking at all.
Once you’ve built four walls and locked the feral cat inside, you’ll soon receive guests who want a glass of water with the fur on it. They pay with leaves or something. No one in Caterwaul town actually pays with money. They pay with things like wood, gold, and gems. Each of these coins has its own uses, from expanding the cafe to furnishing the interior. Six currencies are specific to each customer demographic, each of whom has their own preferences. Pleasing them all is up to you. Except for the small ones, because after your coffee shop is big enough you can get rid of them completely.
The story focuses on the restoration of a cat shrine on the outskirts of town. You do this by collecting “joy,” another currency earned by pleasing your customers. This also unlocks perks, like better food, staff, and restrooms.
There’s no real way to fail, which is pretty good for the management and making genre Cat Cafe Manager an accessible entry for newbies and terrible kids. Cats just resent not being fed, customers reward less if they’re unhappy, and people just complain more.
Which is good, because Cat Cafe Manager can be completely ridiculous. As you continue, people will start asking for things that you haven’t even unlocked yet. Who are the people ordering these? not on the menu and then upset about it? I don’t walk into an Indian restaurant and ask for a hoagie. Why are you asking for a banh cuon?
And the staff. Listen to this, guys. Only serve food and chat asinine with customers; I will make food. I didn’t allocate any points for your cooking, so what makes you think you can make a sandwich? Why can I unlock perks that give you cleaning skills? You never do that! I’m glad I really don’t have to pay you, now get out of my kitchen.
That’s when Cat Cafe Manager no eavesdropping with all hell. First, you need to familiarize yourself with the controls. What your characters think in their interactive space is a complete mystery to me because I can dry customers and still be unable to serve them. Even if I could serve them something, a cat would pass by and my lovable character would decide that petting them was more important.
It sucks when I actually put down my controller and pick up my Switch just in case it’s designed primarily for a touchscreen interface. There are no touchscreen controls and it’s horribly controlled like in handheld mode. I eventually got used to its incorrect interactions, but I never learned to forgive it.
I have a list of complaints about laundry lack of polish. Cats’ brains are often broken and they will whine that they have no food when there is so much food for everyone. Then, oddly enough, the food plates would ask me to fill them up four times, but the cats still insisted they weren’t fed. They weren’t dead or anything; they just refuse to interact with customers.
The UI has a bad design on the whole look. It expects shorter cat names like “Brian” but lets me put “Pete Pickles” where most of the letters are scattered across the edges of the text box. Likewise, you can level up so many times and get so many perks that they start to obscure your stats. And that’s when it doesn’t just crash with the rest of the game, allowing me to “$$ PlaywithCat”.
I have a lot more that I can understand, but I want to address it here. Cat Cafe Manager at least a friendly design. The worst that can happen is that your customers will complain when you don’t have enough money to buy ingredients because only witches pay in the currency used to buy food and you need to serve them a concrete way if you want to buy millions of damn ingredients. it throws at you.
I think I need to reevaluate my priorities if I can go crazy with the game of collecting feral cats and dropping them on paying customers. The whole time, though, I literally scream in the game at my best impression of Gordon Ramsay. I’m trying my best not to drop an F-bomb on every paragraph of this review.
At the very least, the Switch version needs more time in the oven. Error. Errors everywhere. Some of them asked me to restart the software and the loading screen that opened took a useless amount of time to clean up all its cats. Even without them, Cat Cafe Manager control is like absolute garbage, it’s dangerously unbalanced and the UI needs a pass. But it does allow you to pick up a raccoon off the street and treat it like a cat, so at least it allows you to show an appropriate level of contempt for your customers.
[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]
