This game not only looks but plays like a mobile game. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I used to enjoy these mindless games on my phone and that is why I picked it up. It was supposed to be the perfect game to play while watching tv. But the clunky controller support and cluttered UI, makes this more of a cumbersome distraction than comfort play.

The gameplay loop is simple if you like that sort of thing. There are 3 different difficulty levels which I appreciated at first. Until I realized that cozy mode doesn’t give you the ability to unlock steam achievements. I’m confused because the game literally advertises itself as a ‘cozy restaurant management’ but then penalizes you for choosing cozy mode.

There appears to be different storefronts to manage, new recipes to unlock and skills to upgrade. You can change your servers appearance and hire staff to help manage your restaurant. You can arrange the store layout to your liking and there are light decorational options. You even have daily objectives to complete to earn extra coin.

It seemed like everything I wanted, but I play games like this on the steam deck. While all the controls work, the partial controller support doesn’t feel intuitive. There are tabs all over the main screen and you can only use the right joystick to navigate them which feels restrictive at times. It’s just cluttered and disorganized. There really is no need for such a basic game to be this complicated because nothing was done to reinvent the wheel per se.

Overall, this just feels like a cheap mobile port done wrong. The hefty price tag doesn’t sit right with me given the heavy AI usage for the art and the fact that everything else seems sloppily constructed.

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So I played the game + demo for 10h. Only the tea shop though.

Yes it's cute, not revolutinary in any way in term of gameplay but ok, for the price, all works fairly well, it's fine. So if it's your kind of games, go ahead.

But man.. they advertise this as cozy and it's not really.
1- The achievements can only be gained in the normal mode so it's a rush game all the time. Like for example, the Boba Cafe Simulator? That is what I call cozy. They just added a togglable option to add a patience timer on customers but it's 100% a choice. If you want to take all the time in the world to fulfill orders, go ahead. That is COZY. Tasty Chef is not cozy in normal mode.
2- Gacha system.. the damn gacha system is all you want but cozy. You keep gambling for staff which, for the most part, are complete trash. Then you spend hours sorting through all this pile of trash to figure out which one are ok and which one are bad. Then when you are done with this, you attempt to level them up and wait what? more gambling. Some perks are * and * perks are not stackable. Which mean, it's useless to have multiple employee with it. There are like 5-6 * perks on.. 42 maybe? Something like that. I just leveled up 5 characters and they all got at least 1 * perk in the 3 choices. Worse, 2 of them even got 2 * perks and 1 got 3 times a * perk. Man if that is not rigged. The devs know you don't want more of those than needed and yet it's what you get the most in your choices. So yeah, 5 characters mostly ruined because all perks were ♥♥♥♥ and most of perk were * perks that cannot stack so they were just useless options overall. Man, this gambling makes me sick. That's not what I'm waiting for from a cozy game. A cheap F2P game maybe, but a premium paid game, come on dude no thanks. Now i can trash 5 employees that took forever to gain exp (because yeah you have to make them work to gain exp else it would be too easy! and this exp is therefore hours of your life).... A bit disgusted.

Cute but yeah, too many things aren't working in this. I'm not even talking about all stuff bugged. Every time you level up an employee, they lose all their level and you have to start to level them up all over again. Really annoying.

Just mentioning that progress from demo could be used in game and achievements were given based on progress. So that part at least worked well.

Overall it's cute and working well for the price. Just the gacha gets on my nerves more than I thought it would be just because I spend hours working on my staff and that pure crap randomness keep me start over and over again. That's fun once or twice. When you scrapped a dozen of employees that way (that took serveral hours of gaming to level up and all) then you start to get bored of this. And there is no way to bypass those stupid gambling mechanics. *sigh*

Super recommend!!! Best game for chilling ever!!!! 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥