VN - Ren'Py - Cosy Cafe [v0.11] [Cosy Creator]

I've soured on this one a fair bit. Positives first:

The game's visuals are strong and it has a distinct style. Cards on the table it isn't my type of thing per say, I tend to like games where most of the characters look legal, but the competence is there for sure and I can see this being somebody's favourite game visually.

The story is also more ambitious, heartfelt and gradually paced than is the norm. Really feels like it captures a slice of life anime type of story. Again not super my thing, but I can respect the effort and depth.

My big issue with this game, is that around 80% of the renders are extreme close-ups of vaguely sad anime girls. That is it. The game's camerawork is extremly repetitive and favours these uncomfortably close angles of the girls during the often very long conversations. The expression work isn't pheonomenal so you just spent hours looking at blandly sad anime girls. The page photo this game is actually super honest. Those three shots of the girls looking sort of dower, slightly too close for comfort. That is the game.

The sex is eh. Some scenarios are hot but are spoiled by the fact that 90% of the scene is spent in those awkward extreme close-ups. Nothing special.

Overall, for a totally linear kinetic novel I want more. If we are spending so much of the game in hyper close-ups, your expressions need to be PHENOMENAL. If the player has little to no choice regarding the story then your pacing must be excellent, the game is in my opinion too slow.

If looking into the eyes of sad anime teenagers at a 3/4 horizontal angle is the only thing that can get you hard, this is the best game ever made. For me this is some servicable but massively overhyped melodrama.

This VN is one of the best harem VN i have played in f95.
The visuals are very good (especially at the latest updates) and the story is also good and i liked the intrigue and mystery with the five families and the MC family,
Furthermore MC is very good (a true man) and the Lis are all beautiful and interesting and with their own different personalities.
At first i wished we had the option to choose a LI .. but so far i don't mind it because i loved all Lis even though i usually dont like all the Lis on a harem VN but this VN surprised me.
(Lucy and Vicky and Akatsuki are the best though)
(Albeit i dont like Rachel at all and i hope she stays as a joke and doesnt enter the Harem.. she is the only one which i found annoying )....
Moreover i like the fact that MC is a true Alpha and gentleman he respects the Lis and he doesn't force them or belittle them but at the same time doesnt accept any bullshit which in my opinion is the correct male dom.
In the end I truly enjoyed this VN a lot and it became one of my favorite harem VN , i cant wait for the next update and i highly reccomended it.

Very surprised at this one, did not know what to expect going in, and I think that's the best way. A lovely story with some fantastic renders.

Animation on the scenes could use some work, but overall it's very damn good

One of the best and most consistent RENPY games. Cute girls, some funny dialogues but also an actually interesting story.

Not to mention all the sexy scenes, which are (mostly) well done. The MC is also not too out of the world and stays somewhat consistent within his character.

Based on an hour's worth of play, I wish I could get my time back. All credit to the developer for working on this, but I've a few things to say.

I'm not sure why the score is so high, as the quality of writing for all that I played is dreadful. The characters are flatter than graphene. The MC is featureless and makes the most inane decisions. The story is as boring as it is contrived, with things progressing in ways that leave me grasping for my suspension of disbelief.

I appreciate the time spent by the developer in making what is obviously considered a decent or better game by many other people, but in my opinion this is the worst high-rated game that I've ever played here by far—and should never be played by anyone who values their time.

Interesting kinetic novel, while it starts slow, the narrative improves over time but the dialogue writing is pretty average.

The focus on word and render count as a metric for updates is likely holding this back, as the quantity over quality approach has me reaching for my clicker macro to speed through much of the dialogue.

I'd have given this 3.5 stars if I could, it's worth a look if you're interested in the themes, you like slow paced kinetic novels, and don't mind the dialogue.

Absolutely love this game and how well written each of the characters are. I love the interplay between MC and each of the girls. Favorite is Victoria for me right now as I enjoy her attitude and teasing back and forth. She's not submissive in all aspects of her personality, but she relishes that part of her relationship with the MC

So here's my take on my experience of the game. The first thing when i dived onto the game i noticed that the game lacks in the details on a characters expression at some point because in each conversation the Ll im talking to either has her mouth shut or portrays themselves with the same expressions she gave a while ago. For me this tiny detail is pretty crucial for players to immerse themselves having a conversation on said girl this tiny detail made me avoid looking at the Ll for hours and just look at the dialogue box all the time and it made me irritated a bit. Secondly i noticed that the mc is quite matured especially speaking he's only 18 years old, he sometimes comes of as either well mannered and does a 180 and becomes cringy ( i think they made the mc the type of mc that is one of those "Feel Good Mc's" but failed so fucking miserably in my opinion.) . These two details just made me abandon over 3 hours spent on this game and never have i wasted 3 hours of my life reading trashy cliche of a story. Overall the rating this gets is too much given how low effort the authors of this gave ( and yes I was irritated about the uniform of the boys which makes their necks non existent for some reason.) how the models are just you're typical model you see in maybe 40% or more avns out here.

- Wandering Reviewer

The game has both some fairly strong upsides and some fairly strong downsides. For a small description, Cosy Café is a very chill read with some interesting political/mystery undertones, which suffers from how the story is being told and repetitive character motifs.

The music is nice albeit a bit repetitive. The plot overall is interesting, though it can feel convoluted at times; there's a political aspect of several families which control the area and the business around it, and then there's also the aspect of the MC's café and the sustainability of his business. These intersect fairly seemlessly down the line due to the plot, but the reasons around it can feel a bit disjointed or not quite logical at some points.

That being said, the game definitely lives up to its namesake and feels quite cosy to read. There aren't any particularly large dramas or things that you feel will derail the story or become a huge happening, and as such, it's a very straightforward slice of life/romance visual novel for the vast majority of the time, and it works.

The characters are, unfortunately, somewhat forgettable. Some of them are unique and can feel distinct, but some of them quickly fall into the wayside as the plot progresses and it's clear that the update gives a higher focus on another person. This is an issue with the storytelling aspect of this game, that I'll touch in the next paragraph. Back to the characters at hand, they can feel blurred together because they're all submissive. The MC is dominant, but the dominance is asserted in a... childish way at times? And very out of the blue, too. Some times, the relationship between the characters feels natural, but at others, it feels forced and nonsensical. It doesn't help every character is blatantly submissive at basically all points, or is willed into submission by the MC (or appears that will go that way). There's few that escape this, and they're the ones that show no interest in the MC at all; every single other one appears to be going down this route. While their role as a submissive can differ slightly, they tend to blend together at points.

The storytelling has one issue which is that the game follows the god awful forsaken by heaven method that is "Day X" development. I remember a certain game popularizing this, but I cannot stress enough how annoying this method of development is. Because you're making it go day by day, there's an extreme amount of happenings in each day, and because the days are separated by updates, this means that you can go entire days without interacting, seeing, or doing anything with a character you were joined at the hip the very previous day, because this update is not focused on that girl. Lucy, particularly, suffers tremendously from this.

Not only that, but the day system makes the game feel even more divorced from reality than normal for a porn game. It's "day 24' in game, and we go through each of these days one by one. The main character moves in on day 1, obviously, and meets most characters on Day 2. It's Day 24 and he's both fucked and started dating 3 while also being romantically involved with 3 others (depending on how loosely you want to describe it). In other words, the dude's been ACTIVE for these 24 days, huh? Some of the submissive have undying loyalty and devotion to him for... pretty much nor reason. They've known him for 3 weeks, and they haven't particularly gone through anything meaningful together for the vast majority of them (Lucy has a more interesting storyline, but she's quickly forgotten in recent updates in lieu of other girls). They just got spanked a couple times and wooops guess I'm a slavegirl master.

While I can't say that I disliked reading the game, I can't say I liked it either, mainly because of how updates work and because of the day system. Other than that, the game is good. Honestly, you'll probably give this a 4 or 5 as long as you suspend your disbelief. This score is biasedly lowered because I don't like this particular form of story progression.

this game surprised me to no end. the mc is fun, charismatic and engaging. the girls are also beautiful and engaging, especially vic. Dev also working very fast, two updates since i started to play. i got nothing to say but congratulations to the dev and can't wait for more

Deducting a point mainly for the lack of meaningful choices (it really is a kinetic novel rather than a game) and to be fair to games with better visuals, but I have very little to criticize. Of course the models all end up looking similar after you’ve played a few games using the same "engine", but I don’t really hold it against them. It leans heavily towards huge breasts, but isn’t as egregious as many in the genre on that front and introduces more reasonable body types as it goes. The variety of outfits is also nice.

The writing is mature and the storyline is sensible considering the premise of a harem VN. As is typical, the MC is inexplicably a chick magnet, but they all develop actual relationships organically and each adds depth to the underlying plot and variety to the slice of life elements. They have different goals and personalities, different reasons for becoming attached to the MC, and continue to play their own parts after joining his "collection". Each warms up to the harem and BDSM aspects at her own pace, and the MC is very respectful and caring towards them, and treats his situation more like a fun kink than some kind of superiority complex towards women. There were several instances where the characters’ issues and their support or attitude toward each other really tugged at my heartstrings.

Even though the premise of a guy opening a cafe and fooling around with his staff seemed superficial on its face, I quickly became invested in the fate of each character, and I am genuinely intrigued by the, well, intrigue creeping up around them and pulling the MC into something much more substantial. It remains to be seen whether the writers can stick the landing and keep things interesting without expanding the harem to the point of absurdity. Hopefully the linearity will help them keep a firm grip on how the story develops and fully utilize each character.

As of 0.9, typos and other errors were also extremely few and mostly concentrated in the more recent releases, which helped keep the experience seamless.

I'm surprised at how much like the story, unlike some other VNs, this one doesn't has an overly complicated world taking or dimensional invasion plot, as far as it goes is very insular and mostly reserved to the city they reside.

The main girls and well developed now jumping to the MC bones at the first 5 minutes , the MC actually take his time to help, develop and even ease into their relationships, and while most scenes and quite vanilla at the beginning this keeps escalating , all the times with the girls willing to do more things as the story goes.

The MC actually acts like he cares for the girls and takes they opinions in account, this isn't your usually Pokemon harem story where the girls are mostly there to be fucked, he never tells them that he loves them but his action speak louder than his words.

The graphics are very good for the girls, I love that most of them look different, have great bodies and personalities that aren´t copied and pasted.

I really like the domination aspect, the good girls and spanking scenes work without feeling forced and awkward, you do get the feeling that the girls find comfort and solace in his treatment of them, being dominated in a light almost playful way and getting the love and attention that most of them lack.

I´d like to seem more of the sisterhood they seem to be developing but, so far it works for me.

The MC isn't a wet noodle, or asshole with a 20 inch horse dick, he actually mostly comes as a more or less normal guy that had a rough life and wants to me the best for himself and those he considers his own, he for a change seems to have a pretty decent idea of where he is and where he wants to go.

Perhaps the only subplot I find hard to believe is the one with the molesting the school teacher in the train, not that I don't find it hot, or like the domination scenes in the bathroom, its just that I don't find hard to believe that the teacher hasn't noticed its him and still seems to believe its an old man, that the only one I really find a really hard to believe.

The MC figure is one of the things I don't really like that much when he´s in his school uniform he looks weird too bulky in mi opinion compared to the lithe guy he usually looks without it, his face loos fine, but his dick looks like a sausage with a meathead most of the time (I know I'm being a little too picky, but it kinda annoying seeing that in the BJ or sex scenes)

Overall I would give it a 8.5 out of 10 with a potential to easily become a 9 or a 10 with some modifications to the MC, and further development of the story.

When I started this game, my thought was this guy gets it. I’ve seen a lot of complaints about the bland plot. However, this game never tries to be anything more than some simple fun. There is no grand world shattering plot that so many VNs attempt and fail at. Sure the families are a kind of scheme but even that’s more locally than globally. Realistically this is niche Harem game where the following apply:

1. The MC makes sure to make it known that he is the ruler of his household without being rapey or abusive. Sure he’ll take the others opinions into account but he has final say.
2. The plot is actually going somewhere with there being smaller subplots that get resolved with major ones spread accross several chapters. Too often even excellent writers forget to stop the plot from dragging out. Looking games that are reaching a decade of dev without any end in sight.
3. The Harem doesn’t seem like it will devolve into Pokémon, where the number of girls never stops expanding, and even though there are stereotypical girls that’s fine as long as they have personalities and have not remained shallow. Even the quiet girl speaks volumes with what she doesn’t say.
4. The relatively vanilla male-dom actually works because not every game needs to go full hardcore and this one is actually refreshing since it’s a de-escalation.
5. It’s actually quite formulaic. There’s a lot of criticisms against this, but truthfully, they work when executed as intended.
6. There’s pregnancy planned in the future.
7. The smol (not the type of smol that shall not be named) tsundere.

Overall, I think this game was not made for the type of catch-all audience that many attempt. No this definitely a specific type of audience. Now are there flaws sure there are:

1. A lack of expressions that are needed to fully express and immerse the story.
2. HS engine this is a double edged sword because it’s relatively fast to work with but is also limited to what HS can do.
3. The number of settings/places have been limited so far.
4. There is still seems something holding the MC’s more aggressive nature. Almost akin to a mental block.

Still these flaws aren’t going to make me turn the rating lower. In fact, it serves as a constant reminder that graphics aren’t the number one thing.

This game is ... alright. I don't think it deserves the rating it has right now.
So starting with the sexual themes, it is as vanilla as it can get. You won't find any spice there. I won't be judging the game based on that though.

What I will judge this game on, are things such as poor presentation. Main screen, UI and everything else you would expect from a VN are really bland, no effort put there.
Another thing is the lack of outside world, we are stuck in the cafe, school and train station travelling back and forth. There are 2 times in about 6 or so hours of "gameplay" where we go somewhere else which makes everything really repetitive with time.
There are barely any dialogue choices and even when there are they don't really change anything.
Sex scenes are nothing to write home about same as renders.
Male models are probably the worst looking I have ever seen in a game, fortunately enough our MC's face is not shown.
When it comes to MC he doesn't stand out as well, pretty bland and boring character. Ordinary personality yet somehow attracts all the girls by barely doing anything.

Now for some positives:
Girls are definitely the main good thing about this VN. Pretty hot, each with their unique personality and problems. One thing I have problem with is the lack of expression on their faces, the game is circulating between 2 types, the shy one and normal expression.
Dialogues are coherent, non-cringy, quite well written. The story is okay. Music is pleasant to listen to.
Overall I enjoy the wholesome vibe even though it's not really my thing.

However it's to be expected sadly, a little dose of wholesomeness and your stereotypical harem and people will eat anything.

I rate it 3/5. I was even leaning towards 2/5 with how bland this game is right now but I quite enjoyed the company of Akatsuki, and looking forward to spending some quality time with her sister.

This is a game you will either love or hate... explained below

1) Developed in HS with typical HS models and animations that you will have seen in plenty of games before which could put some people off with how much futher along other games are nowerdays with their graphics.

2) Predicable character set (Shy one, slut but not slut one, angry one, or combos of the traits). This doesnt bother me, but again there is a sense of de-ja-vu as you feel like you have seen these characters in other games sometimes.

3) Girls are all a bit "easy" - dont get me wrong its a porn game so you expect lewd content, but there could be a longer build up considering how active the updates seem to be for this game... most LIs immedately want the MC, and the ones that "dont" you can clearly see do also.

SUMMARY

Do i like this game - Yes
Do i recommend this game - Yes if you like harem games
Could it be improved - Yes (pad out the story a bit more)

I am not a fan of the HS engine myself but this game is extremely playable and i do recommend it for fans of harem games (like me) hence my rating.

I'll get right to the point: Cosy Cafe basically has no redeeming qualities. The plot is poor, the characters are beyond cliche, the self-insert has all the charisma of a sex pest, and the visuals are atrocious. These problems are a dime a dozen in this genre, but the creator doesn't even bother to bake in lighting to at least make it look decent like other Honey Select-based VNs. The only bright spot I can see about the game is that there is a fair amount of it, but I can also also say the same about me taking a massive shit. I cannot fathom why this has such a high review score unless the game's quality in nearly every aspect dramatically improves beyond the first hour or two of gameplay.

This is such a lovely game to play.

The girls all have strong wants and needs, and problems they need to overcome. They're not notably deep, but they are all loveable and effective.

The light BDSM adds a bit of sauce, while still retaining the "cosy" theming.

The story is simple and a little cliche, but has, so far, been very well executed. It remains quite compelling.

The amount of content produced over the course of 20 months is impressive and laudible - however, that does lead me to my only complaint, and why it's not a five.

The author has clearly decided to avoid custom lighting in order to speed up the production purpose, and left it mostly on default (except for the bed time scenes). There's no depth of shadows, and it makes a lot of the images look quite flat.

Honestly, it might add a few weeks to dev time to set up some basic lights for each scene (with modification on character close ups), but for this reader, it would be worth it.

This is definitely one of the very few titles worth supporting financially. I encourage everyone to drop at least a month on Patreon, or make a donation on itch.

I like and enjoy these types of harem games.
* exceptional main story so far
* best characters
*good MC willing to play tough guy and caring at the same time
* relationships devolvement is not rushed and makes sense
* renders are good
* future tags look promising.

I give in my top 7 out of 100 games I enjoy.
will support dev when completed, been burnt too many times dev abundant game halfway or (unfinished, confusing, rushed) ending

Simply one of the best games I have played!

The story writing tugs to your emotions making you more immersed and invested in the girl's stories!

The only thing that might be odd is the character's mouth not moving while talking as compared to other games but I hardly notice after about 5 minutes into the game

Awesome work Cosy

By far the best game on here. Sure, the models might not be the prettiest, sure the backgrounds and settings might not be the most detailed, but the overall vibes, the comf-cosyness of this game is the best. Sex scenes arent rushed, and everything is paced really nice.

All in all, Peak.
First game I ever put in the cash for. Might be the only one.