Harvest Cafe Review

Harvest Cafe is a nice and cosy combination of farming and restaurant management, developed and published by World of Poly. In this game, you’ve become the newest farmer on the island, who has taken it upon themselves to restore an abandoned restaurant and turn it into a place where diners far and wide will come to for a quick meal.

First off, let’s talk about the graphics and they’re just… okay. Even on the highest settings, Harvest Cafe doesn’t look too impressive, though there are some screenshot-worthy sights to be had, such as at night while shooting stars streak across the sky. To be honest, from the way the character moves, it does call to mind premade animations created for Unity projects like this game. It’s not bad, and I quite liked how the player character’s body interacts with the environment, but there is a sense that some compromises had to be made.

The prime example is with the island itself: it is pretty damn empty. There are only two NPCs to interact with, which can be upgraded to three upon fixing the windmill, and they’re just vendors. The rest of the island is populated by resources and animals that feel a little randomly placed around.

Also, I found the music a little unsettling. It’s fine for what it is most of the time — a very peaceful sound that puts you at ease — but at some points of the soundtrack, it kinda sounds like something might be out to get you. It’s not a secret horror game or anything, so I don’t know why I felt that way, but that’s a thing.

Harvest Cafe starts off without any preamble. Once you create your character (with a limited set of options, by the way), you’re dropped into the game with a task list guiding you through the early hours, and a nice little thank-you note from the developers, which is cute. From there, you’ll be gathering materials, acquiring some basic tools, crafting stations, and getting a few crops growing. It’s actually a fairly enjoyable process, but it is mired by some issues I’ll get into later.

But, to get to the point of running your own restaurant, it’ll take a lot longer than you’d think because the place needs to be repaired. You’ll need to go through a bunch of tutorial tasks that will require tons of different materials and crafting stations before you’re even given the opportunity to cook something, which took around two hours to do.

Once you do have the place up and running, it’s time to fire up the stove. Before you open, you’ll need to select the dishes you’ll be making for tonight’s service based on the ingredients you have available. Thankfully, all those tasks you’ve been doing have prepared at least one dish ready to be made, which I really liked. There’s a real sense of progression as you slowly but surely create a farm that can practically take care of itself while you’re out getting more stuff. Heck, you can eventually repair a dock and get out into the sea to fish. Anyways, once you think you’re prepared for the dinner rush, all you need to do is head out and turn the sign around to open.

Customers will arrive at 21:00 (which will be skipped to) on a boat, and all you have to do is wait for an order to come in, cook the food, serve it, and then collect the cash once they finish eating. Repeat until either you’re out of ingredients or it gets too late. It starts off pretty easy to deal with by yourself, but as you get better recipes and ingredients, more people will come, and things will get chaotic fast. You can hire workers to help you out and train them to do their job better, but being unable to pay their wages will cause them to quit.

Running the restaurant is decently fun as you manage the rush of customers, but it does get a little overwhelming too quickly for my tastes. Still, it’s the most efficient way to make money, which you’ll need to buy all sorts of spices, furniture, and services.

Now, all this collecting, crafting, and cooking is great and all, but it all comes at a cost: your energy. Every individual action, when you mine, craft, farm, and harvest, will cost one energy point. Run out, and you’ll be locked out of doing anything for the day. Levelling up only gives you more recipes (and eventually a coffee machine), but you can get an extra 30 points of energy if you go to sleep at an appropriate time. It can be a pretty limiting mechanic at times, often finding myself needing a bunch of stuff done but with not enough energy to do it all. Better tools will reduce how much energy you use, though, which is nice.

However, I think my biggest issue with the game is how inconvenient everything tends to be. Just all these little annoyances that make Harvest Cafe more of a chore to play. I assure you that despite all my complaints, I still had a rather enjoyable time, but I like some things to be a little more accessible. For starters, there is fast travel, but you’ll have to find a sign to do that, and it’ll only take you to your farm, the town, the cave, and the restaurant. Everywhere else either has to be travelled to on foot or by horseback.

What really bothers me is the fact that the cave, which you can access fairly easily, only has iron ore, and even then, it isn’t as useful as copper, glass, and steel. If you want copper, it’s in the quarry behind your farm. Steel? Near the Town and up on the cliffs. Glass? Close by to the farm, but requires navigating around some mountains and carefully avoiding falling into water. You get used to it, sure, but it always feels like a chore to do. I’d prefer if everything was in one place rather than having to ride around the world constantly to get what I want.

Purchasing items requires either buying them one by one, or buying the max amount you can afford or is available. There’s no way to select a specific quantity without just spamming the confirm button enough. That’s better than how crafting goes because there’s no Craft Max Amount button, which I would actually like to have. And as for all the stuff you’re collecting and probably storing in chests, there is no way to sort items, which makes organising your storage a real bother. Though, I admit it may be because when it comes to crafting, all your materials are available no matter where they’re stored, which is convenient. 

Aside from all that, the game also doesn’t really explain some of its mechanics all that well. Sure, the aforementioned tasks do guide you through some stuff, but not everything you might be interested in, like getting livestock. There are some tips, but they’re pretty out of the way, and I doubt most players would even glance at them.

Onto technical performance, and on the settings Harvest Cafe automatically set for my PC, it ran at 60 FPS most of the time. However, I suffered a couple of crashes, stutters, frame drops, and pop-in throughout my playthrough. Meanwhile, there were times when my player character got stuck while mounting the horse and animations didn’t play correctly.

Despite my nitpicks, I actually got really into Harvest Cafe. Although it lacks the refinement and budget needed to truly bring out the game’s potential, it’s still a fun and cosy game to play with a great sense of progression and a good gameplay loop. It just needs a bunch of quality-of-life features to make the various chores you have to do enjoyable gameplay that melts the hours away.