Happy Monday everyone! I hope you've all had a fantastic weekend and ready to start a new week. My weekend was rather relaxing, I spent a night away from home with no gadgets so you could say it was like a mini detox. I managed to complete a lot of achievements in World of Warcraft and got some hours in to my next game: Little Witch Nobeta.
I'll be starting this week with another review and this time it will be for Little Dragon's Cafe. The art-style in the game is so charming and sweet, I was instantly drawn-in by this while also knowing the creator of the this game also created Harvest Moon. As I've mentioned before, this is a game I wanted to play for quite some time but was always put off by the mixed reviews and price tag. I picked the game up on Steam during the Summer Sale for a fantastic price and would definitely warn anyone NOT to buy this game for full price, rather wait for a sale if you wish to add this to your game collection and give it a go.
In Little Dragon's Cafe, you and your twin sibling take responsibility over their mothers cafe after she falls gravely ill. The introduction to the game acts as a tutorial to teach you how to run the cafe and find new ingredients. The games story is split in to chapters with each one hosting a new character that comes to visit the cafe with their own troubles and in need of assistance. While this game was created by the man who gave us Harvest Moon, do not expect to be doing any farming in this game as it is non existent.
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| Image from my Steam library, just need two more achievements |
A day in Little Dragon's Cafe will have you help run the cafe by taking orders, serving food and cleaning dishes. You can cook dishes to add to your menu but you will not be the one cooking when working in the cafe. You can also venture outdoors to collect new ingredients by foraging and fishing, you may also get lucky and find some recipe fragments which will unlock a new dish once four of the same set have been found. There are various cut-scenes that can be triggered by entering an area at a certain time of day or by waking up and heading down stairs in to the cafe.
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| To cook a dish, you must play a simple rhythm game by pressing the correct key in-time |
The ingredients you can gather and areas you explore in the game are gated by your story progress so you may need to wait some time before you can cross over a bridge or find a certain ingredient. There is also no map present in the game which can make it a little bit tricky to remember where a certain ingredient can be found or where a certain NPC is located.
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| Outside the cafe, ready to explore the world! |
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| One of the areas that you unlock later in the story, it looks rather pretty |
Everything happens so fast at the beginning of Little Dragon's cafe after the tutorial ends. The player receives a dragon's egg that hatches rather quickly, on the first or second day if I recall correctly. You also meet characters that want to work in the cafe within the first few days meaning that you have a fully operational staff team with very little time and effort, a bit too fast for my liking and also unnecessary due to the cafe being so quiet to start with.
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| All of the cafe workers minus the spooky looking ghost |
One thing I quickly learned when playing this game was that there is no punishment for sleeping to skip days for story progression. You would receive negative feedback on the scoreboard at the end of a day which has no impact other than having the cafe staff mention how bad yesterday was. I found myself doing this a lot in the last few chapters due to becoming extremely frustrated with the cafe gameplay.
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| Having a nosy in my mums room |
If you have been reading my most recent posts, you will know that I very quickly became frustrated with this game. One thing that really bothered me was how the staff would behave like a brick wall and push the player around when trying to work efficiently in the cafe. So many times I would be so close to handing in an order or by the sink to wash dishes then I would find myself trapped, being pushed to the other end of the counter or away from tables by Billy or my twin sibling. I also felt that the staff slacked way more than they worked. The cafe gets very busy as you progress through the story and customers will get up and leave if they are not attended to. When trying to gain reputation to progress the story this is extremely annoying as you find yourself running after the staff to speak with them.
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| So many customers, no help from my twin or Billy. A lot of these people left angry |
I also did encounter a graphical bug with the gathering nodes which surprised me due to this game being out for quite some time now. When nodes are ready to be gathered from, little butterflies fly around them. I noticed that once you've gathered from a node, from a distance it would show butterflies again. When going back to the node it's empty. This wastes travel time if you back-track on something you collected at the start of your journey. I also had some scenarios where fruit would drop from a tree or an enemy would drop meat and it would get trapped behind terrain or fall down a cliff and I was unable to obtain it.
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| A magical bush ready to be picked from |
The gameplay does become rather repetitive after some time which may bother some players. This was not an issue for me as I have played many sim games over the years with similar mechanics. I wish I could say that I loved this game but sadly the charm and cute characters cannot erase the cafe gameplay that would make me see red. Why can the NPC's move through each other but push the player around, its so rage worthy when trying to get a good score by running the cafe (there is an achievement for helping out 50 times).
What rating would I give to Little Dragon's Cafe? 5/10
This rating would have been higher if the cafe gameplay was better, visual bugs were not present and the possible addition of a map. I also should mention that the controls were not very good and found myself getting stuck when trying to do a simple jump up to a ledge.
I hope you all enjoyed reading my review on Little Dragon's Cafe. Hopefully my review writing is improving with each post. I intend to be as spoiler free as can be and not reveal every single aspect of a game so the player will still have some surprises. I'll see you all tomorrow on my next post, let me know in the comments what you thought of Little Dragon's Cafe if you have tried it out.
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