Developer:: Roost Games
Publisher: Freedom Games
Platforms: PC, Switch
Tested on: Switch
Cat Cafe Manager – Review
Not too long ago we were already engaged in running a dog shelter simulator with To The Rescue! and now we got a chance to set up a similar business by creating a cat cafe with Cat Cafe Manager! This is the very first game by Roost Games, a small team of three indie developers who formerly worked for Abbey Games (the developers behind Renowned Explorers). As it currently stands, games from Abbey Games have always been received with positive reviews, and this made us look very much forward to Cat Cafe Manager.
Story
Cat Cafe Manager seems to borrow a few pages from the script of Stardew Valley, as the story follows a youngster (you) who travels to a remote town to follow in the footsteps of their granny. The town is called Caterwaul Way, and granny used to run a cat cafe here. You will quickly find there’s a good reason to run a cat cafe at Caterwaul too, as there are plenty of stray cats running around, waiting for a home. Aside from cats, the quaint little town has a population of fishermen, artists, businessmen, travelers, witches, and punks. All of them will soon visit your cat cafe, curious about what you have to offer.
Just like in Stardew Valley, the game also has an evil corporation present. This corporation wants to destroy some remote sacred cat shrines to make room for their own plans. By running your cat cafe, you can try to stop the evil corporation and bring the town closer together. That’s pretty much as deep as the story goes though. We only found some extra story value when learning about the backgrounds of the game’s five main characters. The story bits you get are divided over the course of the entire game at a slow pace, putting more focus on the gameplay and the beautiful graphics.
Graphics
It’s easy to see that the artist from Abbey Games is still working with Roost Games as well, and has improved since that time. Cat Cafe Manager has beautiful graphics, where the environments and portraits of the friendly inhabitants of Caterwaul have a soft palette with very warm graphics. Your own customizable cat cafe, the cats, and everybody visiting are also very nice to look at, thanks to the happy inviting faces of characters and fun animations. That being said, some of the programming of the graphics (and some gameplay elements) still needs some polish. We did not find any game-breaking bugs, but i.e. some auto-tiling got messed up from time to time, giving tiles weird corners in the middle of our floor. As another example, some portraits of cats were missing. These types of issues are generally easily fixed in a single patch. Sadly, we encountered them nonetheless and felt it was necessary to mention them, for it took away some of the pleasure we had decorating our own cafe.
Sound
The sounds in your cafe are exactly what you would expect them to be. The meowing of cats, some inaudible voice lines from visitors interacting with your cats, the occasional sound of something special happening such as a phone ringing, and a chill background tune to make sure you can keep working. At times these tunes were a bit repetitive, but we did not find anything truly bad or annoying. Everything in the sound department suited the game quite well.
Gameplay
Cat Cafe Manager is really straightforward. While it could be seen as a simulator, we would also put it under the casual games genre. We would do this because the game is very accessible for all ages and has a certain chill vibe to it. When running your cat cafe you have multiple tasks to perform. These include cleaning up cat pee, petting the cats, taking orders from customers, and serving them. The game feels very accessible because you can do all of these tasks, one by one, by holding a single button when you approach them. Later you can even hire staff to do them. While we did not find any objections to these controls, we found that again, some of the programming could be better. These one-button mechanics require you to stand in a certain range and direction of the task at hand, which was sometimes a struggle. On top of that, the game sometimes had false information or a food menu in our cafe that did not work properly. These are the more important bugs to fix.
You progress in the game by serving a variety of customers, and each of them pays you in their own way. Fishermen pay you in fish, artists in jewels, businessmen in gold, etc. You can use these currencies to buy new stuff. Fish is used to buy cat lures to find more cats, but also other cat equipment such as scratching posts or litter boxes. Gold and jewels combined form a solid base for most furniture. You also need to buy new recipes and ingredients for dishes to keep your stock up. Better items are unlocked by going to the cat shrine out of town and selecting what you want to unlock next, after which you get points towards unlocking that goal by simply serving customers. The end goal of the game is pretty much just unlocking all the shrine upgrades.
While we found the simple mechanics and clear goals perfectly enjoyable and even somewhat addictive, it also felt a bit like a grind at times. The game is nice, and we really liked that cats, you, or future staff can level up to add modifiers to the game, but it could do with some other goal(s) to give you a bit of a challenge instead of just grinding. Now it was a repetition of expanding our cafe, some slight resource management, and buying new stuff to make our customers happier. While we understand that the end goal of the game is to unlock everything, we found that it could have used a bit of variation.
Conclusion
Cat Cafe Manager is a chill and especially cute-looking game. The controls and the gameplay are very accessible to all ages. Sadly, we found some bugs in the gameplay and the graphics that took away a bit from the fun to be had, but even so, the game worked fine as a whole. It’s nice to create your own cat cafe and to decorate it how you want it. The only thing we would like to see different is something extra aside from the game being a grindfest from one unlockable set of items to the next.
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