Preview: Let’s Cafe is cute, but it’s unbalanced and lacks an actual goal

Let’s Cafe is in early access, so I’m not going to be giving a score. However, I still have some thoughts on it. I’m not sure what the dev team is planning on implementing in the future full release, but I hope it’s something overhauling.

Let’s Cafe: Can you call it a game?

While Let’s Cafe is visually cute with its pixelated style, it’s fairly basic in terms of gameplay. Your entire goal is to make the orders for your customers and upgrade your shop. This should seem fairly standard practice for these sorts of games.

Unfortunately, Let’s Cafe branched off the beaten path by adding randomization into the mix. When you end your day, you can go to the shop. There, you’ll be able to buy ingredients, buy recipes, and potentially upgrade your shop.

To buy ingredients, you’ll be using the money that you earned by selling food. To upgrade your shop and buy recipes, you’ll be using stars. You get stars at the end of every work day and, I’ll be transparent here, I have no clue what determines how many you get.

Here’s where things go off the rails. The ingredients in the shop aren’t only random in type; they’re random in quantity as well. Likewise, the recipes that you can buy are random and you can’t see what makes up a recipe before you buy it.

So, you have no control over how or what can get stocked into your pantry. I’ll be honest, I only made 3 full days and I bought all the ingredients and every recipe I came across and I still couldn’t make anything new.

In fact, I was having to take things off the menu because I wasn’t even being guaranteed access to items that I had recipes for. 

FOMO should not be part of your gameplay structure.

It created this situation where I just bought everything because I wasn’t sure what recipe would pop up the next day or worried that I’d miss a crucial ingredient I’d need coming up. Don’t do this. You only have a limited amount of space to store different items and I filled it up after the third day of buying everything.

At that point, I was having to sell back ingredients at a loss to make room for things that I was missing in a recipe.

This game is not balanced in the least.

When you boot up the game, it asks if you want to do 5, 10, or 15-minute days. This is not something that you can change later and I promise you’ll regret doing 10 like I did – much less 15.

If you play Let’s Cafe, 5 minutes is probably going to be your sweet spot where you’re making money and stars, but replenishing the shop more often. That’s the only way I feel like you’ll be able to make progress in this game.

I played about 40 minutes and felt like I got nowhere. I wasn’t in any better position than I started in.

So, we can’t control the ingredients we access, we can’t choose from all the recipes, and we have limited space. Is there a way to fix that? Yes and no. You can unlock shop upgrades, but they really don’t help much.

The first one is simply called “calculator” and I accidentally bought it. I still don’t know what it does. The second one was a shop upgrade, this gave me more access to ingredients. So, you eventually have a better handle on the range of items, but you still have a random quantity that you can buy. 

Sadly, the upgrades don’t really make your life easier.

You can try and bypass the recipe issue by throwing items into the grid and hoping you land on a recipe, but you really won’t want to do that. Not only are you wasting ingredients if you get it wrong, but you don’t get to keep the food even if you get it right. Either way, you’ve wasted ingredients.

So, what is Let’s Cafe? It’s putting ingredients in a grid to create food your customer asks for… and that’s it. That’s literally all you do every day with no bigger goal to it. The only thing I got from this game is a bit of wrist strain from dragging items all around my screen over and over again.

I hope when Let’s Cafe fully launches, the devs will have added some greater incentive for the game.

If you’d like to try Let’s Cafe for yourself, you can try the demo or buy it on Steam for $9.99. Otherwise, you can check out the review we did of Caravan SandWitch.

We got a code for Let’s Cafe from the developer and played it on PC.