Tailside: Cozy Cafe Sim Preview

Tailside: Cozy Cafe Sim is a… cosy café simulator, developed and published by Coffee Beans Dev. Even though I don’t drink coffee myself, I do appreciate the art of making a nice cup of joe, so this seems like a nice game to play. However, in the process of previewing this, I somehow managed to go against the Cozy Cafe Sim subtitle and played the game as if I was desperately fighting bankruptcy with each passing day.

And honestly, I wouldn't have it any other way.

The start of a new caffeine-filled life.

The setup is pretty simple: you play as a fox who has just moved into a new town and taken over the old café. Now your job is to serve and satisfy whoever comes through the door with a smile and some coffee. The residents are all willing to help you get settled into your new life, and you might even get to learn a little bit more about them. No worries, no stress, just live your life and––OH MY GOD THERE’S PLUSHIE GACHA! Stuff making coffee and friends, collecting them all is the real endgame!

I like the writing on display. It might be mundane in the grand scheme of things, but it endeared me to each and every character that arrived in my café. It was nice to learn more about Toffee and his sleeping habits, Marigold and her waxing on plants, and all the little newspapers that are written by Aurora. The cosy characters definitely fit in with the cosy atmosphere the game creates… outside of work hours.

Your typical day will start with you getting out of bed and prepping your shop before you open. That could involve collecting cups from the previous day (which I’ll complain about later), ordering furniture to decorate the café to your tastes, or buying pastries to sell to your customers (with an upgrade). It’s a good idea to get these tasks out of the way because it will save you some headaches during your shift.

Once you open up shop, it’s time to get brewing. From nine to five, customers will come in and place their orders, and you’ll be making all their caffeinated dreams come true with everything you have. The drinks have to be made in a specific order, so you should memorise the recipes you’ve obtained because checking the recipe book wastes time. For the fancier drinks — like matcha, honey latte, and hot chocolate — you’ll need to do a quick mini-game to complete them. There are upgrades to skip mini-games, which does help a lot when in the middle of a rush.

There are plenty of upgrades to unlock to make your barista journey a little easier, but I found that some upgrades were an active detriment, such as the one that auto-completes orders. It seems useful on paper… until you realise that there’s no indicator when it activates. If you’re doing it fast, you could end up serving the wrong drink. Sure, there’s no penalty other than losing out on money, but it does bother me a lot.

However, getting upgrades is all moot if you don’t get the chance to actually earn them. As it only requires money to do so, upgrading the café isn't too difficult, but getting skill points to learn new recipes, hasten timers, and get bonuses takes forever to get, due to how long levelling up takes and how many points are needed to unlock them. I ended up being stuck serving three types of drinks for ages, which did make serving customers easy, but it became a little monotonous after a while. You can reset your skill points for 1000 coins, but it’s a bandage over the larger issue.

With all that said, if you want to skip the slow progression and just have everything at your disposal, there is a separate Sandbox mode where you only need to worry about how nice your restaurant looks and how many servings you can do in a day.

There are a ton of options to tailor your experience to be the best for you, such as how fast a day goes by. Want to constantly move as if you’re high on caffeine? You can set it to 10-minute days. If you want to relax and take your time, you can set it up to 30 minutes. If that’s not enough for you, you can import custom characters into the game if you don’t like all the cute furry customers. There is support for controllers, but I would not recommend it if you want to go fast; it’s too awkward and more trouble than using a mouse.

My biggest issue is the task of collecting everyone’s used cups. If you don’t clean up after your customers, you won’t have anything to put drinks in, but my word, people do not know what common courtesy means! Most of them don’t leave their cups on the tables but instead throw them onto the floor like trash. Since this is a solo endeavour, I have to stop making coffee and run around the entire café to clean. It doesn’t help that cups can hide behind furniture, so sometimes I’d miss them even after the shift is done, and as you expand the café, the more time it takes to do it. Chores should be fun in games, and not actually feel like one!

But I should remind people that this isn’t the full game, so this is all subject to change… although, I have to admit that this already felt like a fully-developed game to the point where I forgot this article was supposed to be a preview. Hey, there’s plenty more coming, like a greenhouse system, weather, more decor, and even the chance to visit other players’ cafés.

I came into Tailside: Cozy Cafe Sim expecting to get yet another cosy game that gets old after a while, but I was hooked from beginning to end. I loved the little stories each resident had, the gameplay was extremely engaging, and I felt every upgrade I obtained and became a better barista because of it. And it’s not even done yet! Its full release is coming out sometime in 2027, which is kind of insane. I’m looking forward to its continued development!