I'm 10 hours in and I unfortunately cannot recommend this game at this price tag. There's a slew of issues with the actual game mechanics, random crashes, and more. I respect that a lot of love was put into this game, but it needs fixing and updates. Honestly if the bugs were fixed and most of the issues stated below were addressed before it released, I would gladly pay like $50 USD or more for this game.

TLDR: Game is lovely on the surface but is riddled with issues that kill your gameplay experience. They then get worse over time to the point that it feels like the game should have been early access instead of a complete release.

The Good:
1. Cute art style and lovely cast of characters to befriend!
2. Cats! They’re all very lovable.
3. The cafe management sim isn’t super duper grindy. It’s just the right amount.

The good points are all the main selling points of this game. It’s relaxing, cute and a nice way to destress while playing something light. The amount of space you have access to is abundant if you want to get creative with your cafe layout.

The Bad:
1. Constant crashing once you’re more or less “midway” through the game. Once you’ve gotten enough progress into the story, the game has random crashes. Thank god for the Autosave or else I would have lost like multiple days of progress. This is random too. Sometimes it crashes when you place new decor down, sometimes when you buy ingredients, sometimes just by standing there.

2. The menu mechanics are complete crap. Not only do customers start ordering things you don’t even have unlocked yet after like Day 15, you lose points because of it. They’ll order things that aren’t even put on the menu, and the tips on what type of customer prefers what food on the advertisements don’t help either. I’ve found that some artists order the same food as fishermen, some punks order the same as businessmen, etc. Not only does this just serve to infuriate you, it also eats all your resources, forcing you to always have witch customers to make up for the ingredients being used up at a rapid pace.

3. Some achievements don’t seem to be functioning properly. I’ve sent off a cat with a Fisherman stat of 21 to get a forever home which SHOULD be the highest score possible, and I am unable to unlock the “Gone Fishing” achievement. Some other prompts are also a bit buggy. Maybe I’m missing something, but it doesn’t explain – another issue with the game is the lack of information.

4. You can’t manage your belongings. Once you buy something, you can’t sell it. What’s up with that? There’s no incentive to keep older items, yet there’s no option to sell them either. So you’re forever stuck with an inventory that accumulates.

5. Your hired staff have horrible AI. They’ll address a single customer at a time and once they finish the rotation for said customer (take order, cook the food, deliver), they’ll just stand off to the side for a whole minute ignoring every other customer that needs help. Not only is this an issue, but you also cannot assign your own staff specific tasks even though you hire your staff based on different parameters. In addition, how come the hiring procedure only shows cooking or service? What if I want a staff member that focuses on taking care of cats? What about one that can fix machines? Unfortunately, they don’t exist. Also the staff limit is only four people. Really? Even in post-game, you’re limited to four people.

6. Town is awfully big and empty. You WILL go to town everyday and despite the large map size, you only have access to three stores and nothing else. There’s so much potential missed here. The shrine you work hard to restore is also very bare bones as you can more or less finish the story of the game within 6-7 hours.

7. Latency issues are present within the game itself. Occasionally, the stores will bug out and resell you a recipe you already bought. DO NOT BUY IT. It will cause you to have a phantom recipe which not only takes your Nectar, but it acts as a permanent menu item you cannot turn off. For example, I accidentally bought a second Chocolate Shake recipe, and now it’s forever stuck on my menu. I can deselect the first one I bought, but the second “phantom” one is still there making it seem like I always have a Chocolate Shake on my menu. This would be a bigger issue, but ironically my point #2 makes this less of an irk because the menu system is crap.

8. Some decor are bugged. For example, a delightful little present you get from Finley is helpful (a cat food bowl), but it stopped working after 5 days for me. The function of the decor itself stopped counting and removing it then putting it back down didn’t fix it. Nor did restarting the whole game.

There’s probably more issues I can’t remember off the top of my head, but I’ve heard that some or all of these are being addressed and fixes are in the works.

Edit: There is a discord for this game where bugs and such are being reported. It's nice to see some form of activity in regards to addressing these issues, but it truly cements the fact that this game needed to release as Early Access instead of a full release. I am willing to fix my review whenever most or all of these issues are addressed.

u can hear the customers psspspspsps at the cats

It takes a lot for me to give a game a negative review but this.. just isn't up to bar.

First of all, it's basically an afk game with decorations and a small visual novel slapped on top of it. The only management you need to do is leveling up skills on cats/staff and selecting what kind of customers you want that day.

The cats have requirements for certain stats. They have food needs, toilet needs, scratching needs, toys needs.
But, IT DOESN'T MATTER if you don't fulfill these needs. Nothing happens if you don't. Other than a small icon that says a cat is hungry. (the other needs doesn't seem to have icons)

It's the same with leveling skills, certain foods require x level in cooking, and when stuff breaks down it requires x level in maintenance. But, IT DOESN'T REALLY MATTER. You can still fix that sink, and make that food. Having the appropriate level in skills only makes the task faster, which would only be valuable if you actually needed to play the game but you can simply afk the entire day.

When customers level up, they also have a higher requirement to be happy. Witches wants plants for example. And having 0 plants makes them unhappy. What happens if they're unhappy? NOTHING! They still come, order tea, and pay with resources. The difference might be in how much resources you get, but I can't really tell personally.
You also can't fire workers if you dislike how you've spent their skill points.

But, an afk game with decorations still sounds fun right?
Expect that the walls randomly get discolored, and the tiles on the floor tiles end up clipping. You get stuck behind decorations and gaining the resources to buy anything is incredible slow compared to how fast the story goes. (which also means the rate your customers want specific decorations) Not to mention the INFURIATING aspect of being given outdoor tiles to make a road to your cafe but preventing me from making those tiles go all the way down to the road. Not to mention my CATS GETTING STUCK whenever they decide to wander to an non-tile part of the cafe (which is incredible frustrating if you're trying to redo your layout)

The game is also designed in you rescuing stray cats and then giving them away for adoption rather than simply enlarging your cafe. Giving them away gives you hearts, which you need to unlock more stuff on your skill tree. Like unlocking new workers and decorations and such. And different lure attracts different cats, however once you lure all the basic cats, you can never lure them again. Not to mention the final "unlock more cat slots" only gives a total of 9 cats and there are a lot more cats to unlock, I've unlocked 15 unique cats atm and I know I have a few more to unlock.

The whole point of this game is to unlock my inner crazy cat lady, and they're not even letting me do that.

It's a good game, don't get me wrong. Pick it up if it's on sale. But atm it still feels very early access.

The story is super simple and short. I got two days of gameplay out of it, and it was really easy to progress if I upgraded the correct parts of my character.

There are a lot of bugs in this game, and I mean a lot. You can get randomly kicked out if you move wrong. Your character walks on top of tables and work spots. A lot of the textures for decor aren't in the middle of the placement squares, so they're uneven and ugly. Build mode is incredibly hard to use when you have lots of servers and cats because they can easily get stuck behind walls and NEVER MOVE AGAIN. I have two servers who are in the middle of my kitchen area who won't move because they accidentally got stuck in a wall at one point. Same for quite a few of my cats. Servers are very single-pathed and do not serve fast enough once you get to day 50+ with how many people you're serving and how fast the day is going. The customization of your cafe is super limited, and it's easy for items not to be moved when you click on them.

Also, you get 50 chair slots at the end-game section. With the number of tiles you get to build on minus a row at the very front, and there isn't a lot of room for customization of your cafe and how it looks. You can't have divided walls so everything tends to look very ugly, especially if you like that divided wall look and want to be able to hang up any wall items.

The cutscenes for the "lore" of this game all tend to be super cute. I really wish they had expanded more on the main "villain" of the game and maybe even given us more options on paths the play could take, each with its own rewards. Almost like Joja vs Pierre in StarDew Valley. This could give more gameplay for the players and give an incentive to play longer. Because, as it stands, the gameplay is very, very short.


The reason I still suggest the game is because it was fun to play for the past few days that I've had it, and it is definitely a fun game to play if you have a little time to kill one day.

Also, we need more cats or the ability to choose between more cats even during the end-game. Because that was really my main lure to the game. Also, maybe making the friendship stats higher than 5? I loved learning more about the characters like Finley, Mateo, and Bonner.

There also aren't enough consequences, imo. You can skip out on upgrading things and you'll just have a longer game ahead of you. Thats it.

TLDR; The game is super cute and worth the money if it's on sale. It has a lot of bugs and can still use some improvements in gameplay and story. It's a good game if you have time to kill for one or two days past end-game, its not worth it to keep playing.

This game is really cute, but unfortunately it's not quite what I expected - I thought this was going to be more in-depth on the management side of things, but it feels a lot more like an idle game to me. After hiring some staff, I basically just wait all day until I can skip to morning, get some resources, then go to town to spend them and repeat.

The music is cute, however i don't know if it's an issue on my end but it doesn't seem like it loops cleanly - There's some weird static noise every time it loops, which is quite annoying.

There's some visual bugs like if I click 2-3 times in a second to buy stuff in shops, my resources don't update. If I click to pet a stray before the interface animations end, it'll pet the right cat but the animation is on top of the wrong one. I also had some customers ask for something on the menu, only for their request to disappear before I could get to them. Then I wasn't able to serve them anything, and they left unhappy.

Also, when you start having a few people in your cafe consistently, while cute, the constant sounds they make when interacting with the cats gets old really, really quick. It can be turned off, but maybe reducing the frequency wouldn't hurt once you have a bunch of people in the cafe, or just a setting to do that?

Last unfortunate thing is that, from what I played, most of the tutorial is an info dump - The game doesn't show you how to do things, instead you are expected to read and remember everything in the journal as it pops up. I ended up doing half the steps to attract strays before the game even told me how to do it. I also found myself going back a couple times to give it another read because I couldn't remember how everything worked.

It's absolutely not bad, but it feels rough around the edges and maybe I am judging too quickly, but from the trailer it looks like the gameplay does not change much and I guess I was expecting more out of the game. Maybe wait a little bit to pick it up once it's received a little more polish, and maybe some updates that add to the gameplay. Otherwise, if you're fine with mostly getting what you see in the videos on the store page, I'm sure you'll have a good time!

great for my autism

Now that I closed my cafe and gave my cats forever homes, I wanted to leave a review on my impression playing the game.

To the positive things first.

1. You start your cafè and are free to build on the plot of land, which is huge enough (late game also considered)
2. There are lots of different strays that you can attract by placing some lure into a bowl and petting them when they show up.
3. The customers that come give you different currency that you can later use to buy stuff to improve your cafè.
4. You have a shrine to unlock different things such as more spots for cats, furniture, food and drinks, and other useful stuff.
5. The conversations with the regular customers are very sweet and enjoyable.
6. You get to hire staff to help you out and also level them, the cats, and yourself up to get useful traits and improve their skills.

Now the negatives.

1. As with many games about managing, it tends to get repetitive after a certain amount of time.
2. You go to the shops, rebuy ingredients every day (or when you run out) and then start again.
3. The auto- buy ingredients function from the store came too late imo, as I was already done with the
storyline when I got it

Usually I tend to review games that get repetitive negative, but in this case the positive outweighs the negative for me and I had a pleasant experience.

Everyone has to know before I say anything else, I bought this game because I love cats. BUT, that's probably also why most people purchased Cat Cafe Manager. Either way, I wanted to say I'm a little bias. Let's get to the pros and cons list!

Pros:

* It's a fun and relaxing SIMPLE resource managing game with cats as the main attraction. You however, aren't going to be challenged what so ever. Don't expect much.
* It's cute. The cats are cute, the dialogue is cute. Everything is cute. Sometimes that's okay.
* Surprisingly it's a longer game than I expected. I had around 10+ hours of game time. I still have multiple achievements left after beating the story. Not sure, I'll get them though.
*The first 5ish hours are actually pretty awesome, however once you get higher leveled workers it turns more into an idle game.

Cons:

* SERIOUS ISSUES WITH LAG AND STUDDERING! Once you've increased the size of your cafe, it becomes a free for all with your fps. I have a high end PC. There's really no excuse for this. I've seen other's complain about it and it's 100% an issue. Not going to lie, I feel like this can't be overlooked.
* Becomes VERY easy once you've leveled up workers. I barely had to do anything and would get a high ranking after each day finished. I found that disappointing. It becomes boring once you are in that position.
* No replay-ability. After you've beat the game and gotten the achievements, that's it. And I doubt, unless you're a completionist, that you'll bother getting all the achievements.
* Had no interest in changing my decor 24/7 in order to appeal to certain groups of people. The game clearly wants you to do this, but it not fun or worth taking the time to do.

I really thought when I started writing this review I was going to give Cat Cafe Manager a thumbs down, but after I wrote it, I realized I had a good time for several hours and it was worth the $20 bucks or less. Despite some of the cons, the only real issue was the nasty lag in the late game play. The bigger your cafe and the more stuff you have in it, expect even more lag. For a game with this type of graphics I find it inexcusable. So, you've been warned. I do give this game a thumbs up, but don't be surprised when you run into the same issue I did. HOWEVER, if you manage to keep your cafe fairly small you won't run into this issue.

This is a very cute game, and it has a lot of really fun furniture options, and the menu is varied, and the characters are interesting enough, and though the plot is a little stereotypical (Big Corp wants to eat Small Town and you have to remind the people there about the things in life worth living for (in this case, it is cats! and maybe other things) instead of selling out to Big Corp) it still hits right.

But ultimately I don't recommend the game because the gameplay balance is pretty terrible. Each different type of customer has a different type of currency that can be spent on different things. There's only one currency for getting food, that thing that you HAVE to keep buying and buying and cannot go without, so it's really, really frustrating to keep stocked up on supplies, let alone buy new recipes. The gold currency is used in several different ways and instead of feeling like it's for premium items (where it's used on top of a different currency), it just makes everything feel locked behind prioritizing businesspeople when you aren't already prioritizing witches (to get nectar for food). Imo would have been better for there to be a universal currency you could use to buy food OR other things, with unique/premium currencies on top for extras, or otherwise making currencies exchangeable, or at least not locking food behind one specific currency so you feel like you're constantly losing out unless you only cater to witches for a bit in which case you feel like you can't progress and there's much less variety. On the note of progression, that's also really poorly balanced. Each day, you can summon a "regular" and your relationship with the regular determines the level of that type of customer. But the only regulation for advancing that is you deciding who to call if anyone - and even if you deal with each regular equally, you're gonna advance them way, way too fast to keep up with. It's better to just ignore calling them, which is a weird choice and feels bad. (It's also really weird to call them "regulars" when they literally never come to your cafe unless you specifically ask them to but minor complaint.) Between the currencies, trying to manage everyone's expectations, and it being wiser *not* to improve your friendships? In a game? That's kind of about that? it's actually kind of stressful to play. And sure, there's not really any penalties for not making everyone maximally happy and it just means you'll get less currencies and therefore improve more slowly, but that feels bad, too.
This is the point where I would expect someone to suggest I get better management skills, but here's the thing - aside from the fact that I would argue I do just fine in other management games, thanks very much, that's not even the point. The point is this is a cozy, cute, unwinding, de-stressing type game. It shouldn't be stressful! It shouldn't be too easy, either, that isn't what I'm saying (because it's boring) - I'm saying that it's stressful because the gameplay balance is *really bad*.

The game also commits the video game sin of having requirements at an earlier level that are locked behind a later level (some people want a high level of books at level 3 and 4, but it's literally impossible to get that many books until 4/5) and the other sin where one of the end game cats gives you a lot of resources for completing shrine tasks... at a time where you will either be mostly through or completely through with the shrine, rendering it totally useless (because it doesn't give you backpay). It's not useful to include a powerful ability late game when it won't trigger due to it being late game!

There's a handful of other smaller things too, that wouldn't be a big deal on their own, but stacked with how difficult it feels to even get through meeting one set of needs, while staying stocked on foods, while having several other needs yelling at you, while purposefully choosing not to use your limited time to advance friendships (with both people and stray cats!), it just becomes... a lot extra. Mainly, it takes the style of level up where when you hit a milestone level that allows you or a cat a new ability, you receive either three (for a person) or two (for a cat) totally randomly selected abilities. This isn't an uncommon sort of mechanic, but it is frustrating when you say, "This is my punk cat!" and then your ability options are between being a fussy diva for art, or a snob for business, which not only doesn't advance your punk cat thing, but now feels like it's wrong to keep going in that direction. And then the NEXT milestone, it's more of the same. And more of the same. The human level ups aren't so bad since there's three options and they're somewhat more universally useful, but when adopting out cats is a significant part of the game, having the random ability type level up with such a small selection from such a large potential pool is again frustrating. A smaller point is how much time your staff spends just standing around doing nothing. This would probably not matter much if it was the only thing. This game also commits the aesthetic sin of "some furniture is better than others stat wise so if you prefer a certain aesthetic that wasn't deemed The Most Comfy, too bad! You need Arbitrarily Superior Aesthetic instead!" Kind of puts a li'l damper on the "build the cafe of your dreams" because the cafe of my dreams uses only mushrooms and pumpkins and that's only mid range furniture (and also only the stats for one table count, repeat tables do NOT count, so it wouldn't be good for my cozy stats if I had all mushroom tables). A final complaint I have is that some calculations for values don't make any sense to me - like a customer will want a toilet value of "4" and then buying a decent toilet with a value of "10" will only satisfy "3/4" but buying a second better toilet with a value of "14" now means it's "5/4" regardless of which toilet the customer used and I don't know what any of these numbers even mean anymore now. There's a handful of elements like that, including staff skill to customer satisfaction ratio. It seemed like staff skill had more to do with how fast they could do something according to the guide, but then looking at details of customer satisfaction, something like cooking skill also affected how they felt about a certain dish? But it's hard to say, because it isn't like I remembered who made each dish, especially when my cafe got big. Either way, I saw a customer got the dish they wanted, but then they weren't as happy with it because a cooking skill wasn't as high as they wanted or something? It wasn't clear. Again, I'm usually fine with shrugging off details like, and could just say, "meh, whatever," except that customer satisfaction affects pay and that goes back to "the balance for currencies is bad" so it makes me care a lot more.

Anyway I struggled to decide if I wanted to still recommend the game or not, and like, if you decide to play it at a slower pace or don't think you'd care that much about the balance issues given there isn't a real penalty, you would probably still enjoy the game. For me, it just really disrupts the flow and that grates, but if you're not like me, then go for the game, it's cute, and I'm still gonna try to 100% it because it isn't like it's unplayable (and I want a good grade at video games, which is both a normal thing to want and possible to have). Hopefully knowing that, finding myself with the game, I'd still play it to as much completion as I can, even if I really hate some mechanical aspects, helps you know where you'd stand with this game.

Cute idea with poor execution.

PROS:
- Lots of cute cats

CONS:
- Lots of bugs
- Poor resource balancing
- A very short story sandwiched between layers of AFK grinding
- No re-spec for stats: I restarted a game ~6hrs in because I realized I'd shot myself in the foot trying to specialize staffers when they perform best as generalists because
- Skills and stats don't matter
- Surprisingly limited café customization, but that's OK because the customers don't actually care
- Basically no character customization, but that's OK because your character doesn't matter
- Nothing matters
- How did a game about cute cats in a café with a plot about the value of community actually end up becoming so nihilist?!