Game: Cafe Master Story
Genre: Simulation, Strategy, Other
System: Nintendo Switch (Also on iOS and Android. Steam (Windows) on October 16th, 2023)
Developer | Publisher: Kairosoft
Age Rating: US Everyone | EU 3+
Price: US $12.00 | UK £10.79 | EU € 12,00
Release Date: October 4th, 2023
Review code used, with many thanks to Kairosoft.
Wake up and smell the delights of owning your own coffee shop. Following a similar style to other Kairosoft management simulation games, can you grind, create a stir, and pour your heart and soul into mastering Cafe Master Story?
What’s the Story of Being a Café Master?
First, you give your café a name or keep the default of Rise ‘N’ Shine. Connie Brewster will then guide you around the kitchen. Connie does a great job of explaining how to play, and a pointy finger and highlight circle show you where in the menu you need to go if you are unsure.
Cafe Master Story follows a similar gameplay to other Kairosoft games. Increase customer satisfaction by serving high-quality drinks and food. Happy customers give requests, which leads to more customers. You’ll need to expand your coffee shop and hire more staff to deal with the increase in demand. Then, in between all the brewing and cooking, you must place decorations and facilities to charm and entertain your customers whilst they munch on their buttered toast and sip their espressos. And just when you think you’ve settled into a great routine, you have the option of starting again in a new town. Luckily, the whole of your existing café gets lifted and shifted!
Hire and Fire
Your new café comes with a waiter/chef, Rick Newman. However, after a couple of months, Connie will suggest recruiting more. The process is easy: select one of the recruitment campaigns, and once it’s complete, select a candidate. Initially, your coffee shop counter only has space for a chef and a waiter. So unless you use research points to increase the number of slots, you will only be able to hire one additional person. However, you could always fire Rick! Each recruitment campaign has a set list of candidates, but new campaigns are available in each town.
Each candidate has a starting level of service and affinity (good for dealing with customers) and cooking and taste (helps improve the drinks and food creation). You can level up your staff by using research points. In addition, each staff member has a skill; for example, Lizzie (in the photo) has a coffee master. This means Lizzie will be better at making new coffee-based drinks. Some staff will work better with customers; others will be better in the kitchen.
After gaining a one-star ranking, you will be able to create new drinks. You start with one of the six genres and then add up to 2 additional ingredients and (once unlocked) a topping. Then, select the most appropriate staff member to make the combination. There are 63 recipes to discover, and an unlimited amount of drink combinations. For example, tea with milk and honey (above) will unlock the recipe of No. 32 Milky Tea, but it will make a honey milky tea which can be sold. You will not be able to sell just milky tea until that combination is actually made.
A Problem Shared
Your Cafe Master Story journey begins in Residential Town, with 12 customers to impress. However, you only start with 6 and need to raise satisfaction and complete requests before the others will come. The requests are in the form of a ‘trouble’. This could be a request for money to help with some project, or it could be a request for a high-quality table and the full café experience.
However, my favourite trouble is the ‘recommend a drink’ one. In this mini-game, you need to select three drinks which complement the request. For example, the girl (in the photo) is looking for something sweet, so select your three sweetest drinks. The drinks then slide down the counter to be sampled and rated. Hopefully, scoring a total of 100 points or more. There’s no penalty for failure other than the cost of trying again. As the game progresses, it’s a lot harder to meet the customers’ requests. So offer high-quality drinks and those preferred by the customer type.
Soon after creating your first drink, a surveyor from Le Nichelin Guide will visit and ask for a trio of drinks. Being successful on these requests gets a reward of money and research points.
Going for Gold
After gaining rank two, you can make meal combos. These follow a theme, like a Breakfast Combo or Coffee Combo. You need to select a drink, a main and a side and then select your best chef to create the combination. A panel of three tasters then pass judgment on your creation. Regardless of their opinion, the combination will be available to sell, although higher-rated combos will command a premium price.
With meal combos come contests. This is the opportunity to put forward your best meal combo in the appropriate category, with the hope of winning the top prize. All three judges will need to rate your dish 10 out of 10 to get gold. As is often the case, the early competitions are not too challenging, but as you progress, you need to use top-quality items to win. This requires lots of research points, money and ingredients to raise the levels of the drinks and food.
Quality Assurance
One of the key activities in Cafe Master Story is increasing the satisfaction of your customers. This can be done by entertaining them with various facilities. Sometimes, these facilities will be gifted; sometimes, they need to be purchased. However, it always costs to place the facility within your café. Customers will then walk around your coffee shop and interact with them, increasing not only their satisfaction but also your revenue.
Placing fixtures, such as vases or screens, will increase the charm and price of the surrounding facilities. You can also buy or be given items, like a silver spoon, which can be applied directly to a single facility to raise its level. Although not all items work with all facilities. To meet some of the customer reservations, you will need to place lots of charm-raising items near a table. Luckily, there is no charge to rearrange your layout, so as you expand, you can change the whole look of your café.
The Top Roast
You get your high score at the end of year 10, month 3. At this point, you can start a new game +, which carries forward various aspects of the current gameplay. Including the discovered drink recipes, compatibility of quality enhancing items on facilities, and compatibility of food and drink with the meal combos. You also get one of each of the known types of fixtures.
However, you can continue with the current game. You may want to discover all the drink recipes, get maximum satisfaction from all your customers, and, of course, achieve a 5-star ranking. I didn’t find Cafe Master Story as complicated as some of the other Kairosoft games I’ve played. However, there is still some strategy needed, especially in developing the meal combos. I achieved rank 5 in year 9, month 7, but I’ve still got a few recipes to unlock and several customers to charm.
Gameplay
The game works really well in either docked or handheld mode, and there is good use of the touchscreen functionality. Although there is a lot of text, the font is generally large enough to read on a small screen.
Moving around the menu can be a little frustrating, as ‘back’ takes you to the game rather than the previous menu level. However, the music is one of the best, in my opinion, it is definitely a toe-tapper!
The game autosaves at 10 a.m. each month, with a manual save also available. However, you can only have two instances of game per user.
Similar to Jumbo Airport Story, I did experience a few instances of the text going blocky. It happens quite randomly, but relaunching the game clears the problem.
It takes just over 2 minutes to play an in-game month, although this will be longer if there are lots of pop-up messages. The in-game clock pauses at 10 p.m. to clear all the customers and tables. However, generally, it takes just over an hour to play an in-game year, but longer if you rearrange your café or spend time levelling up staff and drinks.
Conclusion
The bright colours and lovely pixelated characters of Cafe Master Story fill the screen with familiarity. Designing the best trio of drinks to recommend to customers is one of the best mini-games I’ve played in a Kairosoft game.
Cafe Master Story is not as complicated as some of the other Kairosoft games and with the on-screen help to get you started, it’s an ideal introduction to this type of management simulation game.
Final Verdict: I Like it a Lot 
thank you for the review, now i like this game so much
And thank you for reading!