• Price: $19.99 USD
• Developer: Roost Games
• Publisher: Freedom Games
• Release Date: April 14, 2022

I’ve been a cat purrson person for around twenty years now. I love watching my cats’ crazy antics around the house. When I saw screenshots of Cat Café Manager, I was really excited because cats + simulation games by themselves make me really happy. Together, they’re purr-fection! 🥰 🐈

As the name implies, you will indeed be managing a cat café. You arrive in Caterwaul Way, a cleverly named village where you will restore and run your grandmother’s cat café. In the first few moments of the game, you choose your name, hairstyle and color, and your skin color. Then, you’ll choose one of three traits: Gourmand (increases your cooking stat and chance of using less ingredients to cook), Gentle (better with cats), or Social Butterfly (better with service).

Three cats will come up to you, and you can only choose to take in one of them for meow now. They’ll each have different traits – one will require less food, while another is more resistant to stress, or can clean themselves easier. These kitties will hang out in your café and entertain your customers. Unfortunately, you’ll have to build up the café again from scratch in a vacant wooded area. One of your grandmother’s friends saved what furniture he could from her café, but if you want more you’ll need to go into town to buy some.

Initially, you’ll only have that rundown, moldy furniture to place in your café. Replacing the furniture should be a priority, as they all have different stats to improve customer satisfaction. The moldy chairs you start with have a comfort level of zero, while the best chair has a comfort level of 27 as well as the “expensive” trait. Each decoration/furniture trait will appeal to a different kind of customer. You’ll only be able to attract “vagabonds” as customers at first since you only have a sink to start with to serve water.

There are six different categories of customers, who each pay for their food and beverages with a different “currency.” Vagabonds pay with fabric, artists with jewels, punks with materials, witches with nectar, fisherfolk with fish, and businesspeople with gold. You can choose to advertise to several groups at once if you’d like. The witches’ nectar is used to pay for the ingredients used in the café, while fish are used to pay for cat food, lures, and cat toys. The rest of the currencies are used for decorating and renovating your café.

In order to unlock more space for cats, additional employees, seats in the café, recipes, decorations, and more, you’ll need to strengthen the local cat shrine using the “delight” earned from customer satisfaction. You can only work on one project at a time, and some are locked behind friendship requirements with some of the NPCs.

There are five characters that represent each customer category (with the exception of the “vagabonds”); these people are known as regulars. For some reason, you can call one of those regulars using a phone booth outside of the cafe and ask them to come see you. Their friendship levels increase each time they come in, and once they go up a level you’ll get to know them a bit more. (And they’ll give you a special item to place in your café or something to attract more cats.)

I liked the character designs and their personalities (with the exception of Mateo the businessman). Unfortunately, the maximum level of friendship is level five, so the friendships are a bit more shallow than I would have liked. There’s also an attempt at a plot – “Hawkable Corporation” tries to take control of the small village’s land, including the cat shrine. I appreciated the effort, but again, it didn’t feel like it went far enough.

I really liked the cat designs as well. You use different lures to attract cats for your café. The “cat-that’s-totally-not-a-raccoon-what-are-you-talking-about” will come to your door for the trash lure. A spooky ghost kitty likes the “strange doll” lure. It will take several sessions with lures to befriend and adopt a cat. Once you’ve adopted cats, you’ll need to check how many scratch posts, litter boxes, and food you’ll need for them by entering design mode. You can choose additional traits for your cats by spending points on them, and potential trait options include an increase in earned currencies, discounts on furniture, and more.

Your character also has different skills to level up: cooking, cleaning, serving, socializing, and repairing kitchen equipment. When those are leveled up, you’re given a choice of three traits to add to your character. After expanding your café, you’ll need some help with the increased workload, so you’ll need to hire more staff. They have the same skills as your character but they don’t start out with all of them.

Having employees is extremely helpful. Before, I was doing the cooking, serving, and cleaning all by myself. With employees, I was able to take an order and an employee would automatically start cooking. If an employee takes an order, the items’ icons will appear over the appliance and you can start the cooking. To perform most tasks, you have to press and hold Y; sometimes it felt a bit awkward maneuvering around the café because you have to be in just the right spot for the input to work. The frame rate also seemed to drop later on when the café has been expanded more.

Once you’ve taken and fulfilled a customer’s order, they’ll be happy and a kitty will jump in their lap for some well-deserved pets. What’s a little disappointing is that there’s a limit to the amount of cats you can adopt and keep. You are only able to have 9 cats in your café – if you want to adopt another one of the adorably designed kitties that appears, you will have to adopt out one of your current cats to another home. 😭 All of the cats are so cute and I wanted to have all of them in my café!

Another issue is that there is a limited amount of seating you can place in the café – once you complete all of the projects in the limited amount of shrine trees, you can’t add any more chairs. You also can’t sell any of the furniture you no longer want or need, and while I loved the designs for some of the furniture and decorations, those felt limited in scope as well. I wanted to have more cats, more furniture options, and maybe even the ability to renovate the café to have more floors.

While there were limits to the cats, decor, and character development, I did really like that the game has LGBTQ+ representation, with Bonner the fisherman often mentioning his husband, and Carla-Lalla also has two moms! 🥰 🌈 The inclusiveness was a great addition to an already wholesome game.

Switch it ON or Switch it OFF? Cat Café Manager has its claws flaws – I wanted more of an expansive experience with more cats and decorating capabilities. The game starts to drag a little after completing its brief storyline, but it’s still cute and creative and the gameplay is as addictive as catnip to kitties! 7/10