Pekoe brings you a world of cats and teahouses. You move into a little village that has a few teashops set up to start your own little brewing adventure. It might seem like a game of competition, but each teahouse has its own specialty and the cats seem to run on tea. So, there’s enough hot-leaf juice to go around!
You move into the teashop of a late teamaker that the town adored, so you have pretty big paws to fill. Thankfully, the town is very welcoming and happy to help guide you on your way to being a tea-making connoisseur.
You’ll run around meeting all the cats and popping into the shops to see what they’re all about. Sometimes, you’ll meet cats that will teach you new brewing techniques, but they seem to just be there to talk to and build a friendship with.
There are three main teashops, but they won’t all be open at the same time. Going into them, you’ll find a plethora of ingredients that they’ll have for sale which will help you in your own shop.
The ingredients range from the different types of tea flavors and forms like Earl Grey and Sencha in teabags, loose leaf, or loose powder. You can sweeten it with various sugars and add different types of dairy. You can even add finishing touches like dried strawberries or powdered cardamom.
Armed with your newly purchased ingredients, you have a few options. The first is that you can take those ingredients and brew tea for yourself. By experimenting with different blends, you’ll unlock new recipes that you can refer back to to better help a customer when they pop by.
There are hundreds of different tea ingredients and dozens of recipes to brew. To me, this is where most of the focus for Pekoe went. I’ll come back to why this might not be the best thing despite it being the foundation of the game later.
Pekoe is tea made from young leaves and Pekoe, the game, feels very much like a young leaf right now.
The other option for how you can use your ingredients is simply by making tea for others. At times, you’ll have the villager cats show up asking to have a chat and a cup of tea with you. You can choose to just have a chat or you can make them tea. By making them tea, you’ll be using up some of your ingredients, but you won’t be getting paid since this is just a friendly visit.
The last way is if a customer comes up. So far, this is the only way you’ll be able to earn money to buy the various ingredients in the other shops. By fulfilling a customer request, you’ll net somewhere between 150-200 beans (the currency). It sounds like a lot until you realize that ingredient prices don’t go below 10 beans each and you’ll need to buy multiples if you want to use it more than once.
Unfortunately, this is where Pekoe needs work. Where it sits right now, you pop into shops, see what they have for sale, talk to the cats, and then you either make tea for yourself or wait. Customers show up at a snail’s pace. So, if you’re looking for a game that has constant interactivity, this one isn’t ready yet.
There were some days when I’d wake up, hit all the shops, have one or two customers, and then feel as if I’d done everything there was to do that day. All I could think to do was simply go to bed so that I could earn tea points and hope that made a difference.
Tea points are given at the end of the day based on the tea that you made. These points go toward the town level which maxes out at level 10. At this point, you can consider the game won. You’ll still be able to make tea, but you won’t be getting further upgrades to the town.
Pekoe just needs one small adjustment…
Honestly, I’m struggling a little here simply because I can see all the attention to detail and all the hard work put into Pekoe. It’s a gorgeous game filled to the brim with tea-related mechanics. It’s just missing the pacing.
Pekoe is cozy, but it seems to advance like molasses. There were many times when I was simply sitting on the main map waiting to see the notification that someone had shown up for me to attend to.
I appreciate that I can make tea on my own and don’t need to wait for the game to load them in, but that ends up wasting ingredients that I can’t replace because I don’t get enough orders to do that. Every ingredient feels precious because the paying customer is few and far between.
This is my one qualm, but it affects the entire structure of the game. I’m hoping that since it’s still in Early Access, something may be shifted to allow for more customers to show up. And, for something that comes at $17.99, you want to feel like you’re getting your entertainment value out of it.
If you’d like to try out Pekoe or watch out for the full release, you can find them over on Steam. While you wait, you may want to spend that time hanging out building up a hotel with Tetris-like building formations in Check Inn.
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