Cat Café Manager, unsurprisingly, is a café management game with cats. What will they think of next? You may be like me, and you’ll have first stumbled across it during one of the Wholesome Games showcases, and despite some gentle “spooky-ness” it is very much wholesome to the core. Unlike some fluffy little balls of terror that keep defiling my rugs.

Now, if you’ve ever played a good bit of the mid-00s hit, Diner Dash, you’ll fall right into place with Cat Café Manager. Not a knock-off, far from it in fact, but you’ll know where you stand. This time focusing a bit more on resources, you’ll serve specific customers and employ a series of different skills to gain more Gold, wood, fish, gems, and more. However, your main “currency,” if you will, for climbing the tech ladders is the love and adulation of the townsfolk. This is used by the somewhat “evil” cat in the woods with the shrine to gain you more slots for cats, more staff, different furniture, and so on.

Akin to the very popular Stardew Valley, you play as [enter name here] who has moved back to the small town after a grandparent passes. You take control of the café and try to keep the place alive. Growing the business and relationships without the romantics of the wildly popular farming title, you’ll stumble into a witch, a punk rocker, a Fisherman named Bonner, and a businessman that does that punchable thing by tying his sweater around his neck. With a similarly steady pace, you’ll slowly expand the café from the small hovel you create at the beginning into a huge empire of cat turds and lint rollers.

Each friend, be it the punk or the fisherman, represents both the clientele you’ll encounter and the resources they provide from a successful trip to your establishment. Some of whom you’ll encounter in town, where you’ll buy herbs for tea or beans for coffee, furniture for the café, or even food and “lures” for stray cats. Yes, all your furry nightmares come from the food you leave outside the café, earning their trust and kidnapping them. I’m making it sound far more sinister than it is actually played as, but you are taking stray cats in to sit on everyone’s laps. Seriously, do real cat cafés keep the lint roller business alive by themselves?

Generally, it all works well together. Where the complaints rear their unappealing heads would be the typical Diner Dash elements of serving customers, as having quite a few tables and chairs means you’ll get caught on the furniture. That’s fine, usually, but when you are trying to rush over to customers at a breakneck pace, getting caught on the side of a table can be quite annoying. As can be hiring a couple of staff to help you run the place, and they end up standing about like dullards wondering if they should take a customer’s order or look at their own shoelaces for another hour.

I don’t think I’d be as concerned about this if each staff member were taking breaks due to exhaustion. However, as far as I can ascertain, there isn’t a metric tracking whether or not each person is tired or not. Customers have needs, comfort and café-style seem to be some of those, while machinery, of course, has a ticking clock of when it will break. Everything you’d expect, the customer wants and needs and the repairs you’ll have to do, are all there. It is when something is missing that you notice it. So when my hirees are standing about not taking orders or simply not serving, I think naturally there should be a mechanic in that, but truth be told it could be a mapping issue for them around the tables and chairs.

What Cat Café Manager offers is a purrfectly relaxing management sim’ with a couple of flaws surrounding it. Be it that resources trickle in bit by bit, but progression may speed off down the road leaving you with customers asking for specific meals or drinks, but you can’t buy ingredients quick enough. Tool-tip, at least in my experience, were often partially covered by the mouse icon, hiding half the name of anything I’m hovering over. Then finally, the aforementioned staff issue.

Ultimately, I don’t think there is anything wrong with Cat Café Manager, though I might kick myself in the head for the purr pun-thing later. It is a relaxing and wholesomely charming cat-based management simulator that is inoffensive with its ideas, either be it the Diner Dash café elements or basic management. Though neither is it going to blow you away with how brilliant it does anything because, unequivocally, it has all been done before. Despite the flaws I find with it, it is nevertheless enjoyable to those who find themselves just wanting a simple relaxing management game from time to time.

A PC review copy of Cat Café Manager was provided by Freedom Games for the purposes of this review.

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Cat Café Manager

$19.99

7.5

Score

7.5/10

Pros

• A Relaxing Management Game
• Charming and Wholesome Throughout

Cons

• A Little Rough Around the Edges
• Small Performance Issues with Larger Cafés