Cat Cafe Manager review | Nintendo Switch

When it comes to wholesome games, the Switch has a lot of heavy-hitters already vying for your attention, but if you're looking for a relaxing way to vicariously life your crazy cat person dreams, then you might be in the right place.

by James Michael Parry

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​@james_parry

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Developer: Roost Games
Publisher: Freedom Games
Platforms: Switch, PC
Players: 1

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I feel uniquely qualified to share my thoughts on Cat Cafe Manager at this point in my life, let me explain. From growing up with mum and dad, we always had cats, and I loved them and would even come back to look after them now and again, but I am allergic so never got too attached.

Last year I visited a real life cat café, Charlie's Cat Café near Stoke-on-Trent, and discovered this adorable, fluffy and sometimes sassy world for myself.

More recently, I also adopted a cat of my own, Mary, dubbed "Queen of Cats" by the RSPCA adoption centre, and after only a few short weeks have far greater appreciation for these beautiful animals.

"But what about the game?!" I hear you cry. Well, as is often the case in games like this – particularly Stardew Valley feels like a strong influence here – you've inherited a cat café (ours named for Mary as you may have spotted above) from a deceased relative and are tasked with turning it around.

The town too, affectionately named Caterwaul, has seen better days, and your business starts to revitalise the area and lift the locals' spirits. You'll quickly start to meet regulars who begin as archetypes, but soon grow into more nuanced characters themselves, with some very heartening, and casual (as it should be) LGBTQIA+ representation on display.​

Each day your café will attract locals from one of these archetypes, such as punk, witch or fisherfolk, and grant you an amount of different resources to invest back into the café. You can adjust the advertising policy to control who you want, but certain customers, namely the witches, bring a currency which helps you keep your fridge stocked with ingredients for differing refreshments, so you're forced to keep bringing them back.

The cats themselves begin at one and go as high as seven in total. You have the option of sending them to a forever home and recruiting more cats, but we quickly grew attached to our Tudor king and queen-themed herd and kept them to the end.

There are skill points to invest in both cats and yourself, and later your café staff, to make tasks quicker or service better, but it's all very straightforward, and you never feel overwhelmed.

At a certain point you'll want to do lots of things at once and have to prioritise. Do you expand the space to give room for more chairs and therefore business? Do you invest in more toys for the cats? Do you get that toilet customers all seem to want?

A little patience quickly pays off though as a day flies by in only a few minutes, rewarding you with lots more goodies to spend on various things. We never felt like there was enough of a surplus to really go big and kit out your café mind, always chasing a plentiful inventory and keeping those ingredients stocked up.

It's a shame too that as things get more hectic, performance does start to take a hit. You can have up to 18 customers at once, as well as four staff and seven cats, and by that point there's so much going on that not only do things start to feel cluttered quickly, but regular stutters and even the occasional crash creep in.

To bring in new furry friends to the café you'll need to  consistently pet the cats over a number of days to persuade them to stay...

Fortunately, these niggles don't bring the whole experience down, as the quest to restore the four cat shrines and revitalise the town is so compelling. You earn hearts, or Delight, by satisfying customers, and this in turn unlocks upgrade projects which give you more options, food and drink recipes and, most importantly, cats.

To bring in new furry friends to the café you'll need to leave out one of the various lures and consistently pet the cats over a number of days to persuade them to stay. At that point you can adopt them and give them a name before sharing them with your customers.

Unfortunately there isn't a huge amount of interaction between the cats and the multitude of furniture and accessories around the café. They will sit on customer's laps of course, and have a playful animation, but there's no clambering over some of the decorations, which, admittedly, might be for the best given how hectic things get already…

While you don't need to complete everything to save the town (turns out big business is bad guys, take note), you'll want to keep going to explore the rest of the upgrades you haven't been able to delve into yet, and even find new cats to play with.

Looking after cats is something you tend to do on their terms, since they usually aren't as obedient or predictable as dogs, so being able to build this tiny digital world for them is very satisfying.

Wholesome is the first word that comes to mind, but there is also a somewhat addictive challenge here, trying to balance the various resources, keeping all the plates spinning, and not being dismissively smashed by cats.

Cat Cafe Manager is an experience which kept us hooked for hours and hours at a time, with that urge to "just play one more day" pulling at you to just be able to afford that next thing, or coax that next cat into staying.

There isn't a huge variety of gameplay to be found, and once you have staff trained up to keep the café running you'll find yourself mostly fixing machines or planning your next expansion, but it is all immensely satisfying.

If you've had dreams of multiple cats then this is the best way to bring them to life.

Pros

• Adorable world does justice to a simple, but effective premise
• Endearing characters and thoughtful details everywhere
• Cats people, CATS!

Cons

• Some persistent technical issues
• Resources are too sparse to really splash out
• Gameplay gets samey fairly quickly

9/10