Review of Vacation Cafe Simulator. Clinking Bottles
The cart creaks, and the bottles in the basket jingle pleasingly. Pouring alcohol, whether store-bought or homemade (you'll have your own winery in the game), is a delight in the game, especially when you're praised for successfully completing a mini-game! The alcohol flows pleasantly, and you can taste it yourself.
The main focus of the game is the atmosphere of the working days of an Italian café manager. You’ll have to do everything yourself—dive for oysters, fish, clean up after visitors, scurry through alleys in search of shops selling goods for your culinary genius, deliver finished products, and design the street mini-restaurant.
Messing with artichokes, the king of Italian gourmands, and eternally sunny olives has never been so atmospheric and enjoyable. The collectible game for numismatists with an eagle eye seems to have been added so that it wouldn't be boring to get acquainted with the faceless city. By pressing the Shift key, the hero starts running, and the Ctrl key is for crouching; sometimes Ctrl comes in handy—if you need to pull glasses from the automatic dishwasher.
Once you get the hang of the motorcycle transport, you'll realize how much the game needs its mini-map. It’s hard to find a shop with new records of AI music in the game. I often get lost in the streets. The game also requires a hidden highlight for object categories—I can hardly distinguish modern equipment from the perfect. The hidden highlight for the equipment name and other objects should appear when pressing some key in build mode.
The biggest challenge is managing the inventory; 10 slots is not enough, and inventory management in the game is terrible. If products spoiled on tables with open refrigerator or freezer doors, the game would lose its appeal due to constant micromanagement, players would get bogged down, and the game would become more realistic.
To simplify the mini-games, there are quests, none of which are outstanding—prepare, buy, deliver. The game doesn't strive to be realistic; otherwise, I would have crashed on rocks somewhere near my winery long ago. The game occasionally reminds me of a peaceful Stardew Valley in 3D. It’s impossible to go bankrupt in the game—there will always be a long-awaited help of $350 waiting in the safe, assistance comes after a short time, but it’s worth it even in the middle of the game. Visitors in the game wait indefinitely for their orders; you can't even change their orders, which is a bit frustrating and slows down the gameplay. It’s good that visitors don’t get drunk; that would ruin part of the necessary atmosphere.
By the end, the game turns into a nightmarish routine that you don’t want to end, and learning new recipes doesn’t motivate you to continue playing.
