Not Monday Cafe Review (PC)

If it ain’t Monday, then it might as well be Friday. If time really is on my side, then, I can openly indulge in another desktop affair to see me through the weekend—an invitation in which I will have the opportunity to cultivate fresh ingredients for a quart of soup, make poached eggs on fried bread for barnyard owls, and lay the groundwork for an idyllic lakeside cafe. In Not Monday Cafe, I can do all of these things and more. Similar to what other idle games have offered me in the past, with a lot of speculative thinking and a whole bunch of digital coins in the bank, I can transform the humble roots of a window-sized allotment into a haven for the restless—a cozy retreat for those with a sweet tooth for hearty food and a keen eye for tranquil delights.

Not Monday Cafe takes a page out of the encyclopedia of idler stories, with the outer walls of its core premise mostly comprised of activities that we’ve both seen and endured hundreds of times before. Like its kin, the desktop-hugging game sees you assuming control over a small cafe—a pixelated eatery that sits at the bottom of your screen—and pulling out all the stops to elevate its fickle business model to a better position on the ladder, one that’s both financially rewarding and socially inviting. And it allows you to shuffle all of these moving components into a feasible solution for a larger business by integrating a few nifty in-house perks—efficient colleagues who earn you cash whilst you’re working elsewhere, three hundred recipes for you to cook, and a surprisingly pulpy catalog of items and set pieces to install in your premises, to list just a few.

Make Mine an Idle Sundae

Not Monday Cafe offers a lot more than the average idler. To say that it offers a ludicrously large amount of things for you to do wouldn’t be entirely true, mind you. That said, when saddled next to something a little more generic and forgettable, Sunny Syrup Studios’ take on the role shines much brighter, with its artistic flair and choice of cuisine attributing to its unique and oh-so wholesome aesthetic.

With a hand-drawn menu comprising hundreds of surprisingly detailed and well crafted recipes, a roster of lovable characters and local farmyard vendors, and a gameplay style that’s both digestible and effortlessly fun to work through, Not Monday Cafe immediately strikes me as an utterly fantastic addition to the idler field. And not only does it look good, but it also packs enough of a punch in its weighty customization suite that you could quite easily lose a handful of hours to the simple act of creating allotments and nesting within the fruits of your labor whilst allowing the critters and staff to tend to the more pressing task of serving customers and earning a passive income.

Although you can let the snowball roll and still enjoy the same rewards in Not Monday Cafe, you shouldn’t turn a blind eye to the vast amount of secondary tasks that the game has to offer on the side. In addition to the farming and cooking segments, there are also other areas for you to explore, including interior and exterior design, both of which allow you the chance to arrange floral tributes, dining tables, paintings, and other integral pieces of furniture. Granted, we’ve seen these fixtures dozens of times before, though, as if to illustrate the point, Not Monday Cafe does remind us that, if it ain’t broke, it’s not worth fixing.

Happy Hour

Not Monday Cafe is definitely an easy peeler, what with its core mechanics mostly being built around a few basic clicks and the occasional business decision. Aside from having to make a choice every once in a blue moon, however, the game more or less unfolds on its own accord, with the in-game work being carried out at the exact same time as the other jobs on your desktop. For that reason alone, you could quite easily mop up all there is to see and do without lifting so much as a finger here. But then again, you would also be missing out on some genuinely brilliant things, like its sizable upgrade catalog and cuisine synergies. And there’s plenty of that to go around, too, with both its interface and its materials donning a significant amount more than your traditional idle business sim.

Verdict

Not Monday Cafe does everything right. For starters, it finds a good balance between being an observation deck of an idle game and being compelling enough to keep you second guessing your peripheral vision, often with the intent of coercing you back into the game to trial new ingredients and strategies to make weak points flourish. Combined with an elegant art direction, swappable embellishments, and a pulpy book of moldable settings, recipes, and decorative elements, Not Monday Cafe just feels good to work through, and not to mention exciting to marvel at whilst you simultaneously work through the evening chores or depressing administrative tasks.

An idle game at heart, Not Monday Cafe doesn’t press you into thinking that the best perks are only available for those who actively participate in the breadth of the experience. On the contrary, Not Monday Cafe gives a great deal more than it takes, with its primary purpose being to operate on your behalf whilst you work on other things. And the bonuses certainly stack up here, too, with a lack of player input often resulting in vast coins for your back pocket and a tremendous amount of in-house perks for you to splurge on various aspects of the business. To that end, newcomers needn’t fret about their contributions or lack thereof, for the game does, in all fairness, function only to provide an entry-level desktop experience that doesn’t require a lot of attention or strenuous effort to operate its axis.

The truth is, whilst you could quite easily implement another desktop-hogging idler in the corner of your screen, what with the likes of Steam fostering them by the boatload, it’s only natural that you would want a good one with just as much bite as bark. For that, I’d recommend this idle jewel.