Critter Café Review

Critter Café is a café simulator and puzzle developed by Sumo Digital – which you may know for Snake Pass or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre – and published by Secret Mode. Aiming to be a cosy experience, I got a little excited. I’ve been really getting into appreciating business simulators with outside twists, so this seemed right up my alley. So let’s see if it’s worth saving all these cute little guys from another dimension.

The story is that portals are appearing everywhere around Gold Leaf Isle, with cute little creatures trapped within the Otherlands. Guided by letters written by a mysterious sender, you’re tasked with saving the critters while running a successful café given to you by your best friend, Jessica. It’s a simple story, and you can probably tell who the sender is after the first five minutes, but it’s fine. This game doesn’t need that deep of a story. You’re here for the atmosphere and the cute critters, and by golly it delivers.

The graphics are well-done, with a cute chibi art style that is very pleasant to the eyes. The creature designs are all very cute as well. I didn’t dislike a single critter. And Gold Leaf Isle and its various explorable areas are vast and very pretty… but that’s about it. The only things you can do in these locations are Naruto-run around the place, find blueprints for furniture and clothing items, and discover portals. You can’t talk to NPCs, you can’t interact with anything, you can’t even bring your critters for a walk with you. For places so detailed and brimming with charm, it is also largely empty and once you’re done with the place, you never have to go to it again. I know it’s supposed to be a cosy experience, but man I wish there was at least something to do while you’re out and about.

Now, let’s get into the gameplay. You only have two time slots each day. They are only spent when you open the café or rescue an animal, and the main thing you’re doing for your 12+ hour playthrough. First, let’s talk about running the café. The place is highly customisable, with various options for furniture and colours to make your cosy café your own, and more unlocked as you play. Decorating can be a little fiddly, at least on a controller, but it shouldn't be too much trouble to design your space. Since there’s no money in this game, you’re free to do whatever you want with no budget. That being said, I recommend keeping your tables and chairs close to the kitchen. You can also customise the habitat your critters will live in, but it’s not as easy as decorating the café. I’m a little mad that I can't put a hanging pot over a fire pit.

Once you’re satisfied with how everything looks, it’s time to open up and start serving customers. There are four mini-games that correspond to an order: serving coffee (hold down buttons), making a latte (press buttons at the right time), grabbing food (memory), and slicing cake (timing). As you level up your café, these mini-games get harder and yield more EXP. I hated making lattes just for how long they take to do, which isn’t great considering that customers will lose patience if you haven’t answered their calls. However, it isn’t as much of a worry as you’d think. Once you get their order, you don’t have to worry about them as they will wait until you serve them. Even then, you can only have a maximum of three orders at a time. It does ease the stress of running around trying to please everyone, but it feels sort of lacking.

The critters can help out when running the café, but I can’t tell what exactly they’re doing. They do level up, gaining passive traits and different cosmetics along the way, but when the café is open, they just sort of walk around. They even sometimes get in the way as I run around serving customers by myself. The only direct contribution I saw was through special orders, where you have to select the right furniture, activity, and critters to get a quick influx of EXP. The thing is, it doesn’t directly tell you the traits of various items and creatures. While you can just look at the model itself, it can be a little vague. Like, what counts as yellow furniture? What activity does this thing represent? Does this animal have big or small ears? It’s not that big of a deal but I would like some sort of detailed look at least for the furniture and creatures.

But I’ve been talking about critters without actually telling you how you get them, so let’s take care of that next. Saving the critters involves solving puzzles where you’ll be pushing blocks, hitting switches, smashing stuff, and jumping around. They aren’t very hard at all and there’s only 35 of them, one for each animal. Once you rescue them, they won’t instantly be available to work just yet. You need to calm them down by heading to the habitat to play with them. After that, you don’t have to interact with them again other than if you want to feed them treats for boosts to EXP gain or regain their stamina. There's no direct gameplay benefit for doing so.  They have some cute (if often reused) animations and it is fun to watch them, though. It really makes you fall in love with these critters.

Now, onto performance. At an unlimited framerate, I was clocking in on an average of 90 FPS which is great (if a little unnecessary). The load times were very quick and I didn’t encounter any major glitches. I did manage to find one or two small, unintended shortcuts in the Otherland puzzles that made them a bit quicker to get through, and sometimes the camera clips slightly into the environment.

I didn’t dislike Critter Café but I feel like there should be more. The gameplay loop gets repetitive after a while and soon enough you’ll have nothing to do once you solve all 35 puzzles. It is supposed to be a cosy game where you can relax and go at it at your own pace, but my pace includes being able to skip animations when there’s a customer in need. On the surface, it’s a cute creature collector and café simulator, but underneath there is very little else to keep you playing. But it’s a great game for a younger audience, so please take that into account.