Critter Café Review
If 2024 has been absolutely ripe with two things, they are indie games and adorable creatures in vocational settings. Critter Café is both of these.
Critter Café, developed by Sumo Digital and published by Secret Mode, is a cozy life sim that is part café manager, part creature collector, with dashes of decorating and puzzle-solving. You are tasked with running a café on the picturesque Gold Leaf Isle, but not all is as it seems in this idyllic community. Shortly after you conclude the tutorial on how to manage your new establishment, you begin to receive mysterious letters pointing you to magical rifts that have begun popping up throughout the overworld of Gold Leaf. These portals take you to the magical Otherlands, where you must rescue adorable creatures who have been mysteriously trapped there. These critters are not only unbelievably cute, but they also have surprising talents for helping out in a coffee shop. Who knew!
Fans of mini game-based cooking sims, like Lemon Cake and Cozy Caravan, will find the process of serving customers familiar, albeit simplified. Critter Café features four mini games that make up your repertoire of coffee and food serving tasks. Customers will request one of four possible orders: coffee, latte, cake slices or pastry case items. Although the mini games are few, they do offer variety while you’re on the clock. They require a mix of timing, dexterity, and memory skill checks. Successful completion of orders grants you experience points for the café’s overall progression.
While the café mini games won’t be particularly challenging to most cooking sim players, the shifts at the restaurant are very brief, so players are encouraged to hustle to take as many orders as possible. Ultimately, this is not Lemon Cake. You will not be sweating, cursing, or experiencing flashbacks to your past retail or food service gigs. Almost every activity in Critter Café rewards you for participating, but doesn’t punish you for any lack of performance. If you are looking for a bit of that heart-pumping challenge, you won’t find it in Critter Café. Now, that’s not to say that there’s no motivation at all to do well. Gaining experience for the café and leveling up your business unlocks plenty of fun goodies to decorate your dining space, your critter’s habitat, upgrade your serving capabilities, and more.
I’m sure cozy gamers’ ears will perk up at the mention of decorating, and players of games like Animal Crossing and Palia will find the decorating control scheme to be pretty familiar. However, the limited number of decor options that you start with, may leave decorators feeling unfulfilled. Players will unlock new decor items at a pretty balanced pace throughout the game’s progression, but in general the item sets remain relatively limited.
The areas where I think Critter Café shines the brightest, perhaps surprisingly, don’t actually take place in the café. While the coffee shop itself feels like a simulation: a tiny universe populated by customers who appear and vanish from their seats without ever touching the ground; the environment becomes much more vibrant and lived-in in the various regions of the overworld. The mysterious, anonymous notes appearing on your counter, will point you to the location of magical rifts in the various overworld areas. I was pleasantly surprised by the size and richness of these areas, which include a forested park and a sparkling beach town. Navigating them felt very reminiscent of traveling around the world in Cozy Caravan, in a delightful way. Every turn around a corner brings a new beautifully 3D modeled slice-of-life scene, and potential for hidden secrets like unlockable cosmetics and new decor.
The areas where I think Critter Café shines the brightest, perhaps surprisingly, don’t actually take place in the café. While the coffee shop itself feels like a simulation: a tiny universe populated by customers who appear and vanish from their seats without ever touching the ground; the environment becomes much more vibrant and lived-in in the various regions of the overworld.
My favorite experiences in the game, and the ones I found to be the most polished and thoughtfully designed, were found beyond the magical portals. Each portal leads to a unique large puzzle room, set in overgrown, ancient ruins. Players will solve the puzzles by combining tools you unlock through main story progression, and magical devices set in the ruins, to reach the ultimate goal of rescuing one of the game’s adorable little critters. The puzzles managed to be just challenging enough to be engaging, without being frustrating, and provided a microdose of tension into this otherwise extremely chill game.
Even the environments in the Otherlands felt more cohesive in their design and visually interesting. I started to question whether these creature-saving puzzles were actually the original prototype or inspiration behind the game, and if the café section was added later on in development to pull everything together. Of course, that’s just speculation on my part, but I think the fact that that idea crossed my mind speaks to a decent disparity in the quality of experience between these elements of the game.
Critter Café’s gameplay loop follows a trend that we’re seeing increasingly in cozy games, like Mineko’s Night Market and Cozy Caravan, where in-game time passes based on when players decide to trigger certain activities or when they travel to new locations, rather than as a direct relationship to real-time.
On the one hand, this method of passing time and triggering the day/night loop does remove some of the stress of a game like Stardew Valley, where every real-time minute feels like it carries huge weight for what a player is able to accomplish. On the flipside, in a game like Mineko’s Night Market, this can put too much weight on the player’s choice of activities for the day and even create a sense of tediousness. Overall, I don’t think it caused any of these problems in Critter Café, but it did cause the day/night loop to feel somewhat meaningless (other than to justify other mechanics like the resetting of critter stamina).
Overall, Critter Café has cuteness and coziness in abundance, but I don’t have to tell you that. Just one look at the screenshots of the many adorable creatures is all you need. It also offers some really engaging and delightful moments. However, it lacks a level of cohesiveness and consistency across the various gameplay experiences it offers. If every moment felt as thoughtfully-crafted as the puzzle rooms, this would be a great game! As it stands, I did enjoy serving customers, building up my relationship with my new critter friends, and exploring Gold Leaf Isle. I even had a hard time putting down the game the first night that I played. The question now, though, is whether cozy gamers will settle for good (or even great) but not amazing, in this current landscape of frequent fantastic new releases.
Get to the point, girl
For cozy gamers looking for a blend of genres and a high commitment to cuteness, Critter Café has those bases covered in spades. Unfortunately, it lacks consistency across the various gameplay experiences that it offers. Players seeking out creative game design, polish, and a bit of challenge will need to look beyond the core café management game loop, which occasionally falls flat. Well-crafted puzzles in a beautiful and mysterious environment await those players who are willing to dig deeper.
Critter Café is a great game to play while watching TV or listening to a podcast. However, it may not prove to be engaging enough as a standalone experience to hook players all on its own.
Emily’s Score: 6.5/10
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