Running your own café is normally a daunting task but Tailside: Cozy Café Sim greatly lowers the difficulty. You work a simple coffee machine, providing various beverages for customers that come through. Purchase new upgrades and recipes to expand your offerings, earning more money from customers. Decorate your café as you wish, unlocking various furniture items as you stay open.
Tailside: Cozy Café Sim lets you create a small café that you can customise as you like. It’s easy to make it your own with a variety of decorative options. It’s difficult to fail because there’s almost no time limit or consequences for failure and mistakes are easy to fix. Things can be slow in the beginning as the pace of unlocking new items to serve is slow. It’s a strong game with good fundamentals but hopefully it can do more to stand out from the competition.
Tailside: Cozy Café Sim is available in Early Access on PC for USD 10.99.
Your café starts small but eventually begins growing overtime.
Story – Starting Your Own Café
The premise of Tailside: Cozy Café Sim is similar to Critter Café. You have recently acquired a café and are slowly developing it to be a prime location. As you continue your operations, you meet a cast of animal characters that teach you the basic operations and become your customers. Your café becomes more elaborate as your operations grow, allowing you to gain a terrace location to serve customers.
It’s a simple story that lays the foundations of your new ownership. Character interactions are often brief but you can learn more about them through their character descriptions. There’s also a brief description of current events that you receive when you wake up in the morning. Everything comes together to create a cozy atmosphere where nothing major happens. It’s not a remarkable story but it does the job for the setting.
Everyone you meet is friendly and helps your cafe grow.
Gameplay – The Simplest Operations
Managing your café is simple as the chances of failure are nearly non-existent. You create drinks for customers as the orders come in. Grind coffee beans and boil them in a kettle while also preparing milk. Customers can also order lattes and you have the chance to draw various milk foam drawings on them. As your café gains new capabilities, you can also provide pastries to boost your income. Outside of working hours, decorate your café with furniture as you see fit.
There’s almost no chance of failure, even less than Seeds of Calamity. While you can get a wrong order, customers have near-infinite patience and you can take your time. If you forget a few steps or are unsure how to prepare something, an in-game instruction manual gives you a suitable recap. You can also close the store early if you want to take a break. Failure would require a herculean effort and it’s much easier to take your time.
The latte art looks complex but you can take your time.
There are two downsides to the simplicity. First, you can only make a limited selection of drinks at a time. It helps you refine what you learned but the slow rate of unlocking new recipes makes it feel repetitive. Second, gameplay is similar to other cozy games and it’s not complicated. Standing out from the competition could be difficult without other additions. While there are some unique aspects like plushie crane grabbing, it’s not significant enough to stand out.
Audio & Visual – Animals Moving Around
Most of the characters that talk with you are anthropomorphic animals. Their designs are cute and everyone is encouraging. Other characters consist of small fairy-like creatures that form the other part of your customer base. They have a larger variety of designs but are generally smaller sprites. Decorating your café is where the visuals improve significantly as there is great detail on the different furniture sets.
There isn’t much in terms of audio though you have calming music in the background at all times. You know when customers arrive and when they place an order. Grinding coffee beans or boiling liquids is easy to pay attention to. The sounds go hand-in-hand with the visuals to provide a cozy environment where you make drinks and serve customers.
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- Upgrades make things very convenient but take time to obtain.
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- You don’t need to do much to create great cups of coffee.
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- You slowly get more tasks to do as your cafe grows.
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- New characters gradually appear the longer you stay open.
Tailside: Cozy Cafe Sim was previewed on Steam with a code provided by JJames PR.
