Not Monday Cafe is a cozy idle game that runs on top of your applications, located right above the Windows bar. It is a restaurant management game that runs by itself, and the only thing you as the player have do is plant, decorate, expand the cafe and hire staff.
It features really cute art with a wide variety of cosmetics for both the staff clothing and the restaurant decorations, as well as a wide variety of animal customers to visit your cafe. Another special feature within the game is its Twitch integration, which allows viewers from your stream to be part of the cafe as customers that visit, but more on that later.
As someone who has played a few PC idle games that sit at the bottom of your screen, I do enjoy how hands-free the game is from the very beginning. The game starts you off with 3 employees: 1 for the garden, 1 for the kitchen, and 1 for the cafe floor. The only thing you need to do to start your cafe is picking out what plants you want to have in the garden, and a table and chair setup for your customers. From there, the cafe will run by itself!
The game handles balancing quite nicely, with money slowly but nicely flowing in, making sure that you don’t have to wait forever to get upgrades or new decorations.
During the beta build that I played, expansion size for the garden, kitchen and cafe floor was capped, which meant that we had limited space to play with. Even with the limitations, I had a lot of fun decorating the kitchen and cafe floor, with each table set being given a different vibe through the available decoration, even with the table and chair’s aesthetic.
Speaking of aesthetics, the game features quite a wide variety of decorations to pick and choose from, with different flooring, walls, plants, shelves, and even different table and chair combinations. From fall festive vibes to Christmas winter celebrations, or just your typical cafe complete with a blackboard menu, the game can be customised to suit just about anyone.
Twitch Integration
Not Monday Cafe currently offers a Twitch integration feature, which works by connecting your Twitch account to the game. When you stream the game, your viewers can type “!join” in chat, and a customer will appear in the shop with their username. As a customer, viewers can customize their character from a set list of animals that the game has, as well as ordering specific items.
These little features help a lot with chat engagement, as streamers can ask their viewers what they want to order, and each viewer also gets be an animal that they love. The set list of animals can be found in the game’s documentation, which can be shared in chat as a pinned message, so anyone who joins the stream can check it out at any time.
On the other hand, the menu list for the viewers to order must come from the streamer directly. In the current version of the game, there is no direct way for the viewers to know what’s on the menu, as the menu constantly fluctuates depending on what the streamer chooses to offer, or what ingredients are being grown in the garden.
Though the Twitch integration provides a lot of fun as is, perhaps it could be further improved with an extension that provides automatic updates for the available items on the menu, or a constantly updated chatbot that can tell viewers what’s on the menu when prompted.
Conclusion
The game offers a really cute way for streamers to interact with their chatters with their unique Twitch integration feature. During my time playing it on stream, both the chatters and I had a lot of fun just picking out different types of characters and menu items, just because we kept seeing cuter animal characters or interesting menu items.
Artistically, the game has really cute visual designs for both the cafe decorations and characters, perfect for any players who enjoy the comfy pixel art style. I would especially recommend any streamers to pick this game up for any of their chill just chatting or co-working streams.
This article was contributed by Darren Barker, your sleepy coffee-drinking game design student and co-founder of The Cham Drinkers. Follow him on X/Twitter where he posts and retweets about the ASEAN Game Dev scene and cats.
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