My Little Cafe Nightmare has you serving up coffee and decorating a haunted cafe full of ghostly customers who want a drink.
When it comes to cute and cozy, sometimes a spooky or horror-based aesthetic gets bundled in as well. This is the case for this first-person management game where you are a new worker at a coffee shop for ghosts and ghouls where you must prepare coffee and listen to a shrunken head that hangs from the chandelier.
As the only person with arms, you do have a lot of freedom in this haunted, crumbling cafe. You can start off by just making the coffees and collecting bone tokens, but over time you are able to repair a lot of the rot, decorate the cafe, and make something that’s more warm for the creatures that might just be passing through. There are also some serious management aspects to the game, as you need to keep track of your own equipment, order supplies, and make sure everything is where you can reach it. There is also cleaning to do, which feels very silly in a world that might be partial to some spiderwebs.
When it comes to the actual decorating of the cafe, I started to really struggle. Unlike most management simulators like this, there isn’t a set time that you can redecorate your cafe. Instead, you can actually move anything at anytime. This means that you need to be careful not to grab a countertop and see it auto-rotate away from you, making the area completely unplayable. This can become such an annoying thing to be aware of, especially if you grab something and the kettle that you need is on it, which then glitches into the wall.
The rooms themselves feel quite big and forgiving, with lots of room for customisation. It’s neat that the ghosts have their own tastes and will be so kind to you, a human, if you help them out. My Little Cafe Nightmare is an interesting addition to the cozy, cafe-management genre if you are interested in that sort of thing!
My Little Cafe Nightmare is available now on Steam Early Access.
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