November 22, 2023 - Day 326 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 345

Game: Internet Cafe Simulator

Platform: Steam
Release Date: Oct 26, 2019
Installation Date: Aug 17, 2022
Unplayed: 462d (1y3m5d)
Playtime: 26m

Internet Cafe Simulator is a first person internet cafe simulator. I wanted to play something simple and fun tonight. Unfortunately, I chose this.

I said last week that only a few of my reviews that get a rating of "Nope" are games that are actually bad games.

*Spoiler Alert*: Today that list increases by one.

This is a bad game. The only reason I didn't pull the pin at the 15 minute mark was because I was still trying to assemble my first internet cafe "desktop".

I thought maybe it would improve once my internet cafe was open.

Unfortunately the same care & concern that was shown in the UI & UX extends to the gameplay as well.

There is nothing even remotely approaching a tutorial. You wake up in an apartment, which you're told you've rented, with $10K in your account, and two floating signposts. One to your new internet cafe, and the other to a strip club.

There's a giant hunger bar taking up half the screen, but no directions on where to buy food.

It seems that all of the complex design work in the game went into building a working strip club.

Go to your new premises, pick up a broom, sweep all of the copy-pasted garbage off the floor, sit at the computer and buy everything you need to put together your first desktop.

Almost everything in the game is some renamed real-world item, not in an amusing Car Mechanic Simulator way, more in a "badly-ripped-off-IP" way.

All of the parts show up in a series of identically sized boxes outside your front door. Not that there's anything to explain that.

I stumbled across them. Pick up each box, carry it inside, drop it to open it, pick up the item inside, try and manoeuvre it into place, rinse and repeat until you've assembled your first desktop, and oh, it's after midnight, so no customers until tomorrow.

Go home, sleep, come back, open up, customer comes in, goes to computer, sits down, sends IM that says "Waterr. Thirsty. Waterrrrr."

I have no clue where the water is, and I'm not going looking.

Every single gameplay element feels like it was slapped together from whatever free assets the dev found in the Unity IDE, and wrapped around a single idea, but then couldn't work out how to market "Strip Club Simulator", so threw in an internet cafe as an afterthought.

I'm about to free up 4Gb of SSD space, because Internet Cafe Simulator is an unequivocable:

1: Nope

#InternetCafeSimulator #Gaming #Project365ONG #Project365 #NewPlay