Cat Café Manager review – [Insert cat pun here]

I am a big fan of the type of game you can play to relax. There is a story, some building, but nothing feels too stressful or frenetic. Roost Games’ Cat Café Manager fits neatly into this kitten filled box. It has super cutesy graphics, chill gameplay, and the thought of managing a Cat Café appeals to me.

I was hoping for a more in-depth management sim from Cat Café Manager. The gameplay is closer to classic time management games you used to find on mobiles (think Diner Dash). Essentially, customers come into your café, and you need to attend to their needs within a certain amount of time. You get bonuses for being quick, and you can upgrade various elements in your café to serve more punters. You can also build friendships with specific characters and ask particular regulars to come to your café using the handy phone box outside.

Initially, you have a blank field to construct your feline-filled food and beverage outlet. Then, once you have established your business, you can unlock more equipment (coffee machines, fridges, cooking facilities) to allow you to expand the menu. 

There are also different factions such as punks, witches and artists residing in the town. Each group want different things from your café, so you can choose to specialise in meeting the needs of one group or be more of a generalist. Each group rewards you with a different type of currency used to buy specific items. This encourages you to get a good mix of people into the café. However, the various currencies seem quite unbalanced at present. This makes unlocking certain items and upgrades almost impossible during Cat Café Manager’s early stages.

Now for the important stuff; the cats. You start with one cat and attract more strays as time goes on. Kitties can be enticed to your cafe with lures. Then, once you have built up enough relationship points with them, they can move into your café as a permanent resident. You need to keep them fed and clear up after them, but otherwise, you don’t interact with the cats very much, which was a bit disappointing.

As your café gets bigger, you can hire staff to lighten your ever-increasing workload. This is great in theory, but you have no control over what tasks they do. You can’t order them to prioritise one task over another either (despite each staff member having differing stats for cooking/cleaning). They just do stuff at random. This can make your employees more of a liability than a help. You can’t be ruthlessly efficient and chain together activities when the AI staff might swoop in and do tasks you planned to do. Though mostly they stand around doing nothing when customers are waiting for service.

I liked having different items on the menu for different types of customers but was frustrated by how often customers came in looking for stuff that I couldn’t unlock yet because I didn’t have enough of the ‘right’ currency. 

Cat Café Manager also crashes fairly frequently. I understand the developers are working on fixing this and other issues, but it is still quite infuriating. Luckily, the game autosaves at the end of each day, so you never lose that much progress.

I appreciate the vibe Roost Games were striving for with Cat Cafe Manager, however, it needs more work to squash all the bugs. The game’s various systems (especially its economy) also need tweaking to make it feel more balanced. 

Thankfully, Roost Games are keen to build on the solid foundations they have laid with Cat Cafe Manager (and taking suggestions on Discord). So hopefully, further improvements are coming to what is a solid concept.  

For now, though, Cat Café Manager is not quite purrfect just yet.