I have found a game that invokes a feeling to the early 2000s classic Diner Dash. My childhood nostalgia was intense when first crafting handmade drinks for kitty customers. But, sadly, it’s not all positive for this cute cafe simulator.

Rogue Duck Interactive has once again released a game geared towards cozy game lovers. As a company set on delivering games oozing with hand-drawn, relaxing times, Cats & Cups tries to join the fray. Serve kitty customers drinks that you unlock and maintain your shop. 

Avoiding a Cat-astrophe

Being a cafe owner is tough; you're the only employee, so you do everything. Each customer who walks through your door will need you to make their drink of choice. There's an array of coffees with flavored syrups and espresso drinks that you'll learn. This is when the minigames start. Certain things, you just hit a button: Making the shots of espresso, refilling ice, and making a pot of coffee are just hitting a button. Others, like grinding coffee beans and mixing syrups, will have you do a tiny minigame that will determine how well-made the drink is. The worse you make the drink, the lower your tip will be. 

Each day is about 3 minutes long, and at the end of the day, you have two things to do. The first is making croissants for the next day. Where in the cafe, drinks already have a recipe to follow, you are given full rein to make whatever baked good you want. There are several combinations resulting in a specialty good, while all others will just create a normal croissant. There is no harm in trying new things, but if you want to unlock all of the variations, the cookbook offers shadows of the ingredients that you can try to decipher. After closing the shop is the only time you can make these, so keep track of when stock is running low. 

The second thing you need to do is restock low supplies or buy new ingredients. Shops will have new syrups, matcha, teas, and even Turkish coffee. This will broaden your cafe’s menu. And don’t forget about the baking store, where you can unlock new fillings for your croissants! 

Once you have the necessities, you can take a stroll to two other stores. The first is an upgrade store. Working in a cafe means you have a lot of machines to work with. You start with solid, but slow, machines. Once you get some extra money burning a hole in your pocket, you will want to upgrade some equipment. I aimed to upgrade the bean grinder and the ice maker first. Those were the two things that were taking the most time. Every piece of equipment has a few levels to upgrade, and I ended up with a nice range of full upgrades and not upgrades at all.

Now, it’s time for the decorations and minor upgrades for the cafe. The final store offers plants and scratching posts, cutlery, and even bots to help with the croissant dough. Most of these have little bonuses, like getting tips or customers having more patience. 

Being a Cafe Owner is Rough

Being a one-man show can be challenging. A list of troubles you will run into is machines breaking down and needing to call a mechanic, thieves coming in to rob the place, so you'd better hope there is enough space at the counter to call the cops, and last but not least, running out of inventory before the end of the day. All of these things will happen at once in your run, so it’s best if you know about them going in.

Machines will need maintenance, so you can call a handyman. If you have something done, like ice in the ice maker, you can still use it. This can happen at the most inopportune times. It costs money to get things fixed, and it takes a good amount of time to repair, even with the item to speed up repair time. You also need a spot open at your counter for the repairman to show up and do his work.

Thieves showing up means you need to call the police, or else they will continue to steal your money. If you have a full counter of customers, you will need to serve one to open a spot for the cop. This is incredibly frustrating, and the second quality of life issue that I found. Alongside the thieves, dogs will come around "asking" for money. Now, you can accept or deny, but know there are consequences. If you say yes, you lose a decent amount of money; if you say no, the dog breaks multiple of your machines. So, answer at your own risk.

One horror of your own making that you will run into is running out of product you could have sworn you refilled. My first mistake was forgetting straws, then I only grabbed tea cups, and I ran out of tea after getting flooded with green tea-obsessed cats. Luckily, in the shops, you can hover over any item and see what you already have. This is a great quality of life mechanic and makes shopping so much easier. 

I mentioned that the counter space issues were a quality-of-life flaw, so here is where I am wrapping up all the negatives that I found in my playthrough. 

Firstly, I wish you could expand the orders and their recipes; having to hover over the ticket each time is frustrating. I wish they had been placed in front of the customer and had the order laid out so I could read it while making it. A comment on Steam also suggested putting stars or checkmarks on the ingredients once they were added. I never thought about that, but it would have helped me more than a few times. When you get caught up in trying to make multiple orders at once, you sometimes forget what you’ve added. 

For the counter issues, just allow the special cats to stand off to the side. We have a whole cafe, why do they have to take up a customer slot? This would have been so helpful. 

This one is something that I brushed off, but a lot of Steam reviews pointed out that this game was marketed as a relaxing cafe sim, but it seems to be broken into two sections. The first is the making of the drink. The second is the cat waiting, annoyance meter lingering above their head. I wanted to constantly have all three slots filled with customers, but the ticking time bomb made that counterintuitive while grinding for all the achievements. The longer they waited, the lower the tip and the longer I would have to grind.

Baking is my last gripe with Cats & Cups. You can only bake croissants right after closing the shop for the day. This means that if you forget to get ingredients, you only get plain croissants and less money. I just wish I could go in and make them whenever I wanted. Some reviews also said they didn’t like that they had to “unlock” the new flavors. I personally just looked at the cookbook and was fine. Others were annoyed that we could only make six at a time, which I can get behind more because each time you make a batch, you reset any and all that you had leftover. It just felt wasteful.

As a bonus issue that only achievement hunters will run into, this is a grind! Every single Steam achievement is posted on the bulletin board in-game, and by far the worst one is the server 250 coffees. You would think that, as a coffee server, this would be incredibly easy. Only the matcha and teas shouldn’t count, right? Well, I have no idea what actually qualifies as serving a coffee. This was my second-to-last achievement (having to buy 50 bags of coffee beans and spending fifteen thousand on buying the shop takes time), and I spent seven and a half hours on this game. By the end, I was speed running coffe making like I was going for a world record. I optimized everything, I had all the needed machines maxxed, I had everything prepped, and it was still only going up by like a max of three coffees each round. This made me almost stop trying to 100% this game because I was going crazy. 

The Verdict

I think that the premise was good. A cat-themed cafe is cute. I think the game didn’t have the right amount of direction to make it stand out. Yes, the finished drinks are adorable, and I think it shows the charm the developers were going for, but that is about it. Once you unlock everything the game has to offer, it’s just grinding to earn all of the achievements, and that takes an unnecessarily long amount of time. That, paired with the amount of quality of life issues I found, this just is not something that I can responsibly say is worth the money. Cats & Cups has earned a 2 out of 5 stars from me. I feel like the game needs more substance, and that would have bumped it up substantially.