Phrasemaker

Reviewed on PC

In Tailside: Cozy Cafe Sim, you play a chubby fox with a growing plushie addiction who has arrived in a new town to run a cafe. With the help of some new friends, you are soon brewing up some delicious coffees and decorating your new business just how you like it.

Tailside looks and feels like a classic cosy cafe sim. The art style leans into a slightly retro feel, without looking rough or too pixelated. The color palette is a charming and subtle mix of earthy tones from forest green to creamy off-white and coffee bean brown. There is often nothing more off-putting than a cozy game that feels like an attack on the eyeballs. Instead, Tailside offers softness and warmth.

Although I am sure other people may enjoy it, I had to mute the music. The cutesy plinky-plink drove me mad after 30 seconds. It was like I was trapped in a children’s TV show for 3-year-olds. Thankfully, it is easy to mute and makes the entire experience 100 times better. The rest of the sound design is fine, nothing too grating. The creatures you speak to sound an awful lot like some others I know of, from a game where animals cross to new horizons.

I love the sound of the coffee brewing and the birds singing outside when I open my bedroom window. When you get to unlock the patio outside, the extra space is refreshing, with the babbling stream passing by (don’t forget to grab a lilypad as it floats by). It has started to get a little claustrophobic just going from the bed to the coffee shop and back again.

As you progress through the game, you’re introduced to new characters. The design is lovely, with each cute woodland creature character bringing a completely new personality.

What was refreshing was that they aren’t all two-dimensional ‘friendly’ characters; they have some depth to them. Some are a little mysterious, others funny or odd, just like in a real small town or village. One particular detail I love is that one rabbit character holds her coin, ready to pay for her coffee, between her long bunny ears. It is small, sweet things like that that people notice and enjoy.

As you interact with the townsfolk, you get to know them and can choose the occasional chat option when having a conversation, although these don’t have much of a bearing on the outcome of the conversation. There is no wrong response; this is a low-stakes, cozy game, after all.

Speaking of low-stakes, normally running a business like this would be stressful and high-paced, but there is no punishment for being slow or getting an order wrong here. Another non-cozy coffee shop simulator may have you speeding through coffee and hot chocolate orders like your life depended on it, but Tailside wants you to slow down and smell the beans roasting.

After spending hours in the game, there are a few things I would change if I could. The lack of jeopardy is great; it is what we want from a cozy sim, but after upgrading my equipment, I could do with a little more pressure, just to keep things interesting. Eventually, every day felt the same, and I did start to become bored. Linking the skill points to unlocking coffees, I think, was a mistake, and that should have been a separate upgrading feature entirely.

The problem for me was that I was eager to upgrade the coffee-making kit first, spending skill points on ensuring I could decrease brew time before I unlocked any new coffee types. This would mean I could serve more customers, get more money, and spend it on other upgrades in the recipe book.

This is also where I feel the game is a little confusing. Surely, the recipe book, which is sitting on the counter where you brew coffee and steam milk, would contain drink recipes to unlock? That seems like the logical place to unlock more coffees, not your journal. For a while, as I played, I even forgot there were other upgrades in the recipe book, so focused was I on trying to level up, gain skill points, and spend them on new coffee types.

The moment I realized I had forgotten all about the recipe book upgrades was pretty funny. Confused as I was that some of the characters kept mentioning pastries, along with the fact that I had pastry display units, it hadn’t occurred to me that this was an upgrade I had overlooked. Let’s just say it took me far too long to open the recipe book and find the upgrades tab, but when I did, it made such a difference.

On the whole, the Tailside upgrade system works ok, but I do wish it were easier to get skill points, so I could unlock extra drinks. I spent almost the entire game with only one extra type unlocked (a honey latte sounds amazing) and wishing I could add mocha to the menu. Perhaps even reducing the number of skill points each coffee type requires to unlock would be better, as you only gain one skill point per level, and every new coffee asks for five.

One of the first skills I unlocked was to remove the need to manually complete latte art, as so many customers asked for a latte, and it was taking up a lot of time. As I was keen on making money, this felt like a good investment (it costs five skill points to unlock this ability), but this is a regret of mine. As you level up, you also unlock more latte art, but thanks to the upgrade, I never get to use them. It is possible to reset your skill points for 1000 Coins, so that is certainly an option for me… And maybe I could spend them on unlocking the mocha instead.

I am intrigued to see what the developers at Coffee Beans Dev bring to Tailside in future updates. There is a lot of room for potential and expansion, especially if we could leave the area one day and explore the town. The roadmap currently laid out is exciting and offers new features like a greenhouse, weather system, and even joining friends in their cafes. All of that sounds like a lot of fun, but it won’t be coming until the full launch in 2027.

Until then, is Tailside worth buying today? If you love cozy games, coffee, and cafe sims, I would say yes. It is completely low-stakes and stress-free, a sweet little game to wind down with after a long day. There is enough in the game right now to keep you interested for a while, especially if you love to collect plushies and decorate, organize, and fix up a space.

Tailside is priced around $10 and is absolutely worth the price, especially with the potential for later updates and further gameplay next year.