Critter Café Review (Yuyukari)
Fairly cozy and simple game, might be a tad bit too simple on some part.
The good:
- visual presentations are decent, the theming are mostly on point to and to be expected, look nice and run just fine on my PC and steamdeck
- art direction also done fairly well, they aim for cute moé style and it hit the mark, the character and critter customization could have more accessory to diversify, but the inital option are serviceable
- the model and animation are suprisingly good, but the colision box of the critter and some object miss-placement can sometime interfere with you character movement
- music, while not the most memorable, are definitely serve it purpose well in the game, it doesn't get annoying and did a good job accomapanying the general gameplay
The mid (and hopefuly can be improved)
- the lack of incentive for day to day gameplay loop, the game, as i said; are quite simple, to the point that the player don't really have any particular urgency or much motivation to do or aim certain goal, there's no time limit, no penalty, or actual meaningful progression.
- to expand on the previous point, the core game, the Café management, suprisingly lack any management other than jugling critter energy and updating store layout (in which don't really give any benefit or demerit relating to customer preference outside booking option), there no budget, no tips, no ingridient, you just take customer order, aim to achive perfect result on mini game to gain extra exp, deliver the order, rinse and repeat, and the customer don't really have particular need or demand, you can just set the store seating to be as optimized as possible, wait customer to ordrer, take as much order as possible, and serve them all at once after last order ringed, since you don't really need to worry about money or customer satisfaction, you can simply make them wait for your order as long as you take them after they arrived, and since critter doesn't directly interact with visitor, there are really no reason to pick certain critter that have good buff over other. The other option which is booking mode are simply in which certain furniture and critter might have some prerequisite demand don't really add much other than to quickly pass time slot while still gaining some Exp.
- the game lack of interaction with overworld NPC make the decently made open map to be nothing but a nice window dressing, the game could really benefited from human NPC interaction and bond that link into the game progression, but alas, as of the time i post this review, critter relationship are all you can get, and progression linked simply to Cafe and critter bond level, which you can easily spam by using Booking mode
The bad
- without much incentive, the game get dull fairly quickly, you can easily spam the booking option for fast exp uptime or open regular dine in service with optimal seatiang and farm as many perfect mini game result with critter buff to quickly level up and unlock much of the game furniture and assets.
- once you realize that the cafe segment lack any incentive and urgency, the core gameplay loop sorta lost most of it substance beyond the cutesy and charming presentation
- there's not much interaction you can do with the critter either, which kinda unfortunate because after you rescue a bunch of them, you are basically given the same 4 interaction (outside changing it skin) and sadly, the interaction doesn't seems to give any increase in bond between you and your critter outside their specific inclusion on café segment, which in turn make player hard to develop any attachment toward these critter other than simply a tool to boost your café growth
With that being said, if the dev aim is for the game to be a simple cozy game with dress-up feature and easy progression, then they did deliver
But i do personally think that this game could have benefited with a lil bit of challange in term of actual management and some more interaction to diversify the core gameplay loop that even a simpler cozy game like Minami Lane could achieve, because honestly the presentation are quite charming and it would be wasteful potential to just simply adress it as nothing more than a nice visual decoration to look at
As the game is priced fairly cheap (less than $10 in my parts), i do still recommend it just for the visual and customization alone, but i really hope the dev would explore more possibility regarding the core gameplay in the future update or game with similar presentation/theme