Are you looking for a whimsical management game, filled with colourful characters, and low-stakes mystery? If so, then Tailside: Cozy Cafe Sim might be the addition to your wishlist.
Recently launched on Steam Early Access, Tailside: Cozy Cafe Sim follows your journey as a fox opening a new café. Decorate, make coffee, and meet village locals while discovering plenty in this cosy setting.
The Business Of Beans
The core gameplay loop of Tailside revolves around making coffee. Opening your shop initiates a daily wave of characters coming in to place their order, for you to fulfil in the coffee-making mini-game.
Here, you have many different items to interact with. The tutorial does a great job of walking you through each one. You have your coffee grinder, milk pot, and coffee pot, with stock on the shelf, but you can unlock more. Each station is initiated by clicking it, but it is up to you to decide the order in which things go into the cup to ensure you serve the correct item. The recipes start off simple, requiring only one or two ingredients at once, and go up to three or four later on.
It’s part memory game, as you learn the recipes, and part clicker game, which intensifies as orders pile up. There are mini-games within this that require you to pick out good beans and fill in the designs for your latte orders. You must also keep your shop clean, requiring you to step away from your station to tidy up. It’s actually quite involved and engaged all portions of my brain.
It became rather intensive for me as I tried to do everything all at once. Although there is no downside to failing, meeting daily quotas proved tough, adding stress that contrasted with the game’s otherwise cosy tone.
There are upgrades in the journal that make each of your tasks easier, but I didn’t reach a point where anything was fully automated. Generally, in management games, automation is the goal, but it felt more like the mini-game is the focus here, so I can’t imagine it being added.
Upgrades
Experience points from serving customers correctly grant ability points on level up. Use these to enhance brewing speed or unlock perks that skip certain actions. While useful, I often wished for more and found it took several days to unlock new options. Resetting stats was costly after mistakes.
There are some shop upgrades available. Things like increasing the number of items you can order from the shop at once and unlocking the garden give you something to work towards. I found some of these to be expensive and difficult to obtain, but it seems like there have been some patches to level this out since I played.
Decorate
Levelling up grants new options to decorate your shop, from rugs and chairs to notepads and plants—offering many ways to personalise it. A sandbox mode also lets you decorate freely without worrying about budget.
I think this was my favourite part of Tailside: Cozy Cafe Sim. Being able to place things off the grid and make things slightly crooked really elevates the mechanics and adds to the versatility.
Gacha Plushies
For some reason, you get a coin for a gacha machine that gives you plushies at the end of each day. It’s a cute mechanic, and I liked being able to put the plushies everywhere, but I’m not sure what the point is beyond adding a collectable to encourage you to keep finishing days.
The Proof In The Pudding
Tailside slowly introduces you to its cast and world through cute character interactions and daily letters that introduce the daily plot point. Upon waking each morn, you are greeted with a new letter before going downstairs to uncover the next storybeat.
The characters have adorable pixel designs and yammering-noise voices, which gave me Animal Crossing vibes. Each is introduced to the story in a way that humorously and often unexpectedly develops the world.
Labours Of Management
Although there is an incredible world for you to uncover in Tailside, you’ll likely miss a lot of it because you’re making coffee. The coffee-making mini-game takes up most of your screen and concentration, meaning you will miss out on character interactions. Things like the creatures that come to visit and the speech bubbles showing what characters want you to change were often off-screen until I ran around trying to clean. You also can’t leave the café so everything has to come to you.
The coffee-making mini-game is pretty intense. Granted, nothing much really happens if you don’t make the right drinks or meet your targets, so these targets were self-imposed, but it feels somewhat antithetical to the cosy vibes of everything else (including the store page). I also rarely met my daily goal if I wasn’t locked in.
Additionally, you can sell cakes bought from a local rabbit. Keeping this stocked is another chore for you to keep on top of, but I largely just left it once the items I had placed were taken.
A Game Made For Sprints
Although I was really engaged when playing Tailside, I found myself unable to play more than a few days at a time. The ten-minute gameplay loop suggests short spurts were the intention from the get-go, but it was less a cosy, management sim and more a cute, funny visual novel with a stressful mini-game tacked on. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it stopped me from playing more.
I enjoyed the story, mechanics, and design in Tailside. I had some concerns about upgrade costs and other aspects, many of which updates have addressed, and I believe the developers will continue to refine things. Other little additions, like character portraits during orders, are also a nice touch.
Tailside: Cozy Cafe Sim is cute, well-written and looks cosy, but it’s not the casual gaming experience I had expected from the store page. Although, this could just be a “me” issue, and it doesn’t stop it from being a great indie title in any regard.
Played On Steam (Early Preview Edition)
Publisher/Developer: Coffee Beans Dev
About the Author
