Critter Café Review (「KitsuneKami」)
No currency to manage, no limits to how much furniture you can place, extremely limited interactivity with the pets (for example, you just click a "play with" button and watch a short animation play of a ball getting thrown and the petting chasing it off screen, you don't actually do any of it yourself), with the actual cafe gameplay section being strangely stressful/fast-paced, plus the characters looking like frumpy toddlers with a full diaper, I just cannot get into this game.
There's zero challenge or interaction in any of the parts of the game you'd hope there would be, and then stressful game play sections in the parts of the game you'd hope would be cozier, I'm just left feeling extremely unsatisfied. I can't tell if this is supposed to be a cozy game for all ages, like Animal Crossing, or if it's genuinely meant to be for small children, but if you're looking for a cozy, life sim-creature collector with cafe management, this isn't the game for it.
You run from customer to customer to figure out what mini-game you're going to play for their food, rewarded only with XP when you serve their food since money doesn't exist in this game. Then, you can go into portals around town (not a town you can explore, mind you, it's more of a map with sections for you to fast-travel to) to solve a series of mind-numbingly easy puzzles in-order to unlock a creature for you to interact with.
Upon unlocking the creature, you need to "comfort" it, by traveling around a desolate and ugly island trying to find the specific creature you just saved so you can open up a screen with some buttons for you to click while you watch the game play with the pet for you. You don't get to pet it or bathe it yourself, you don't get to actually play with it yourself, it literally feels like I'm playing with a tamagotchi with added 3D animations. Just click buttons on the screen and watch the creature happily shake.
Thoroughly dissapointed and unimpressed. If you're an *extremely* casual gamer, or intend on playing this with a small child, it's probably a fantastic and cozy experience. For me, however: 5/10.