Critter Café Review

Released in November this year by Sumo Digital, Critter Café has a simply delightful premise; in between running a café you seek out magical portals harbouring fantasy critters who must be saved and nurtured back to employability. After seven hours of strolling through soft landscapes, making coffees, and completing the 35 surprisingly rigorous puzzle challenges, I realised I hadn’t been absorbed into the world of Gold Leaf Isle. Instead, I did what many do towards the new year—think about how strange the year had been and the things I should have done differently.

In traditionally cosy fashion your chibi-style avatar has grown weary of their life and wishes to escape to more wholesome pastures. You are given a café and a persona, both of which are decently customisable, and you begin work making coffees for customers. You expand your skills rapidly, learning to make more complex drinks and meals through simple and frustratingly mundane mini-games. Although the ease, lack of penalties, and absence of money should make gameplay cosier, I think this is overlooking a special aspect of these games. They often feel cosy not through a lack of work but because of the work needed, with time-sensitives and difficulties feeling fun and worthwhile, rather than bothersome.

Live the cosy small business dream in Critter Café

Nevertheless, the café is only half of a pretty bare-bones narrative, as you’ve been receiving anonymous letters telling you the location of rifts containing trapped critters. Leaving the café for larger natural parks, you find and enter portals to complete environmental puzzles in order to meet your apprehensive yet hopeful critter. Your critters begin living in The Habitat, a luxurious zoo-like space sectioned into different biomes which can also be customised by finding and unlocking items through levelling up your café and critter bonds. Once you have rehabilitated your critter by washing, brushing, and playing with them, they can be put to work at the café.

This is the game loop of Critter Café, interspersed with re-used animations and cut scenes and the occasional chat with Jessica, the friend who convinced you to move but never wants to hang out. Rather than finding myself immersed in a community of people, critters, and places, I remained annoyingly detached from the fantasy, realising that I was thinking a lot about the real world; what to make for dinner, when to fold my laundry, how to become a better me so as to survive the upcoming year. I was unamused by this virtual world but found some elements to be shockingly engaging.

Arguably the most important aspect for this game is what they got right—the critters really are adorable. I didn’t appreciate the variety of their designs until much later, when I started finding my guys, the real freaks, the cuties I wanted to max out my bonds with. Wabblebill was the first to win me over with its distinct quacking, which also made me realise the sound design was doing all the heavy lifting of developing personalities and creating atmospheres.

The critters’ work ethic is dismal. I was looking forward to them taking orders and delivering food, but they sort of just hung around cutely and got in my way. The alternative café work of hosting private functions is where the critters really shine. Based on customer requests you choose the correct colour schemes, activity objects, and critter types for a successful booking. Determining the types, such as which critters have wings, spots, no legs, horns or antlers, fur or feathers, was a very slight but welcome challenge.

Small town life feels too static and just out of reach

But you cannot pet the critters, an odd choice for this particular game. In The Habitat you can change their colours the way you would a couch in the café. They will notice you when you’re nearby, stopping to look up, waiting, as if begging for a pat. Unfortunately, your hands are only for carrying cakes and moving puzzle blocks.

This distance is felt throughout the world of Gold Leaf Isle which, ultimately, feels lifeless. In the café you cannot speak to customers, interact with objects, or play with critters. Instead of what I imagined as a bustling establishment with people playing arcade machines and critters climbing over pet furniture, I got a somewhat sterile environment based on aesthetics rather than engagement. Coupled with the monotonous mini-games I was never satisfied hanging out in the café.

The outside environments are equally static and more like landscapes; beautiful to look at but devoid of atmosphere. You’re unable to feel the texture of the sand or lay in a lounger on the beachside. In the snowy mountains you don’t have the option of having a hot chocolate at the winter market or climbing onto the ski lifts. The NPCs fish, paint, make fires, and all you can do is stare at them. You are surrounded by people who treat you like a ghost. This loneliness was surprising for a cosy game, which often centre themes of friendship, love, and community. In place of speaking to people, my mind wandered through recent memories of the successes and horrors of the year, both in my personal life and the public ones which continue to play out on the world stage.

Critter Café’s puzzle elevate the experience

That was until I locked in for the puzzle sequences. Oddly, the most dynamic and playful parts of the game were found in the environmental rift puzzles which, for a cosy creature game, did not have to go so hard. The puzzles start as simple box moving exercises and grow more complex with item and ability upgrades, each one feeling fresh and slightly harder than the last. As opposed to the fluffy but vacuous sceneries, creatures, and people, the rift universes are full of giant hammers, boomerangs, and platforms that move fast and erratically. It gave me what I wanted from the rest of the game—a relationship and mastery of the world through play.

Final Thoughts

So who is this game for? I can imagine cosy gamers being delighted by the intricacies of the puzzles as I was, but others might feel this interrupts the simplicity. I can also see how a game like this could spark delight and long-term nostalgia for someone before finding games that incorporate its elements a bit better. Maybe escapism shouldn’t be the marker for a successful cosy game. Maybe it was necessary for me to play something so casually at the end of the year, so that my mind could be freed up to contemplate the wins and losses of 2024, and the resolutions to be attempted in 2025. Critter Café, with its flaws and subtle successes, is at least a fittingly weird game for the end of a pretty weird year.

Reviewed on Steam Deck // Review code supplied by publisher

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