Others - Secret Care Cafe [v0.8.37 Patreon] [Rare Alex]

Such a unique game which I have not seen before, this does, however, contain NTR. Nonetheless, we have an anime like graphics which I loved, and many hot scenes which play out as a story, on top of that what I love the most is an incorporated management system where you have to act as a manager of the shop and position these few girls on right stations in order to attain money.

Story is interesting and has many options to grow, replayability or simply just playing idly while doing stuff is a big +. I haven't encountered any bugs and the renders/animation are delightful. Plenty of content in the main game loop with some extra story scenes on top to move things along. The only downside is that I need more of it, but it's the way of life. 5*

I agree with most others here. As long as you're willing to edit the savefile (it's stored in plaintext so not hard as long as you can locate the file) to reduce the grind, this is a solid game. The gameplay portion is fun for a while, but gets boring later on, which is where the ability to skip the grind becomes more important. There's a fair number of vanilla scenes that are triggered through the 'chat' events, making the extremely grindy (you initially only had one chance per week but in a recent update you can increase this to 3, which still feels a little low). The NTR events are fairly hard to get, you need to interact with the character with the maids abilities a decent number of times and then you actually activate the event through the maid's menu (different button from their 'chat' button).

The events themselves are pretty well done and the girls are pretty likeable. I especially like that Cynthia (the mc's girlfriend) doesn't want to actually cheat without permission.

It's interesting but it's quite bugged which breaks the experience quite a bit, not to mention the huge grind it's almost mandatory to edit the save which is clearly something a good game shouldn't make you do, I won't say much in terms of story construction Since it's an incomplete game, I'll just say that I'm not convinced at the moment.

The only thing that has convinced me about the game are its scenes since it fulfills its objective as a porn game, that is if the content is quite uneven so if you don't like to share you will have little to do in comparison.

This is a review for v0.8.4 Public. I am hoping that later versions will be more balanced.
At the moment, I think the average score for this game is too high. If you read through the reviews, you'll see that this is because many people will break the game to give themselves extra money. This goes a long way toward solving the game's problems, but I'm reviewing the game as it is.

First the positives:
The idea of the game is cool and original. The maid cafe concept is fun, and from an NTR standpoint, it is exciting to send out your harem to flirt with the customers and develop their lewd stats.
The actual gameplay of managing the cafe is fun too. There's a good bit of strategy involved in who you send out to the street (which determines which clients come in) and how to serve them. It is nice to play a game like this that isn't a glorified VN. There is real game play.

Now the negatives:
The game play is engaging, but you must play through a lot before you start to unlock any of the scenes with clients. It is, in other words, incredibly grindy. To illustrate: you must pay for an ability where your maid gives her number to a client. She can only do this once per day (until it is upgraded again) and then only once per client. To unlock a scene, you must give your phone number to that specific client 11 times!
To make matters worse, you barely make any money day after day. Enough for maybe two upgrades and replenishing your stock.

As I said before, I enjoy the game play, but it becomes quite tedious when there are no rewards. H-scenes are few and far between. You may get lucky with one at the end of the day if you spend it with a maid you have a relationship with.

My final criticism is about the language. For the most part, the dialogue and scenarios are great. I particularly like the giant father-in-law. But for some reason, the dev has sprinkled in terrible Tik Tok clichés like "Couldn't be me" that take you out of the game and are not funny.

Ways to improve the game:
As a game works out its balance, it is better to be unbalanced toward the player. You need to get more money and it should be easier to get more actions per day for the MC.

One QoL upgrade that I was excited for was getting the food and drink replenished at the end of the day automatically. Re-buying my supplies really contributed to the grind. Unfortunately, the dev made the same mistake that other resource management games on this site make, which is that you set it to buy X supplies every day. This does not diminish resource management or grind because you don't sell a uniform set of goods every day, it fluctuates wildly. It would be far better if you could set how many cakes or hotdogs you wanted to have at the start of each day, and automatically buy enough to meet that number.

It would be great if there were more H-scenes, and if flirting did something more than just show a lewd picture. It would also be nice if you could pause to telescope in to a customer interaction, rather than imagine what the flirt imagination might imply as you desperately get a client their cookies.

It would also be nice if you could somehow preview what the rooms will do for you. They are very capital intensive and I don't want to put anything toward the rooms if they don't do anything useful or exciting.

tl;dr
Fun gameplay and great concept, but the grind makes the ratio of actions to H-scenes pretty awful.
With more QoL improvements and ways to spy on the maids, this would be an S-tier NTR game, but without some kind of re-balancing it is below average.

Easily one of the best of it's kind. It's a bit slow to get going but its super worth it. Well written characters & scenes, I dont know if they're asset store models or custom but either way they're really cute. Playing it is super intuitive too.

Review is for several hours in version 0.8.2.

As far as H games go, there's a lot to like here, especially if you like swinging/netorase, corruption, harem, and interesting characters and dialogue. The amount of build up is great and all of the netorase content is disabled by default if it's not your thing, although it seems to make up a large amount of the H content in this game. The four main heroines have a lot of personality and the events are well written and well illustrated/animated. There's a lot of variety of in content, and much of the game is very unique.

The actual BrothelCafe management system and day-to-day gameplay is pretty unique and addicting. Remembering hotkeys for different food and drink items provides a bit of a learning curve but adds to the fun. There's a bit of strategy involved in regards to using your maid's abilities in order to efficiently serve customers and unlock client events. Upgrade paths for abilities require a bit of planning as well.

That being said, there is plenty to not like here as well. Secret Care Cafe is extremely grindy. There is a lot you have to do in order to unlock the content in this game. Upgrades require ridiculous amounts of money and stats to the point where editing your game save file is almost necessary if you don't want to go through hours of padded content to get to the good stuff.

I personally edited my saves because I ultimately think that the game needs a bit of rebalancing-- possibly a bit of rethinking too. I'm not sure what a good balance between believability or pacing and pushing past slog would be, but either more events, adding more time after each day to go through events, more types of clients and CGs during the day, or something along these lines would be good. The backrooms is a good start, but I feel like some of the rooms need a bit more depth.

At the end of the day, this is game is very good-- borderline fantastic. There's something fresh and fun here and I can't wait until this game is done. However, until then, I think this game has to be played with cheats in order to get through some of the slow pacing and balance issues.

Edit:
Version 0.8.3 added an ability that lets you do more than one action after work. Balance is a bit better now and I think it deserves that extra star.

Great game, love the fast paced gameplay and very frequent updates.
CG's look great plus most of them are animated.
Game is very engaging. I played multiple hours over many days.
Art 5/5
Story 5/5
Gameplay 4/5
Fapability 5/5
Music 5/5
DevSupport 5/5
Originality 5/5

The developer seems to be operating under some kind of misunderstanding as to the appeal of managing a maid cafe in a porn game. Clearly, he thinks, we're all here for the extremely tedious stock taking and number-crunching. Massively over-inflated content gates ensure you don't miss a single second of the exciting restocking action. as half your daily profits vanish down the drain for the vital hot dog fund.

But you can at least get to know your employees! Barely, because your actions between days are extremely limited so as to make sure you don't spend too much time away from manually stuffing cake down some dude's gullet.

While the game's scenes supposedly cater to a vareity of tastes, in reality is hits the ol' "tries to please everyone and ends up being a whole lot of nothing" sweet spot. Whatever fetish you're into, this game is experly-crafted to ensure you're not satisfied with any of them. Unless your fetish is restocking shelves.

As for positives: uhh some of the models/animations are cute, I guess? A good premise that just goes nowhere., you hate to see it.

I tried this as something off my normal style - I play almost exclusively "western-style 3d games" (non-cartoon), and was pleasantly surprised. While the artwork still isn't my first choice, that's certainly subjective - and the mechanical part of the gameplay is quite polished.
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To anyone reading this, first off: This is a game. Unlike 90% of the site which are more visual novels described as games or visual novels with occassional mechanics, this is a game. If you're looking for porn gif segments, look elsewhere. If you want real gameplay, you're in luck!
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Interface:

-UI/UX is quite polished. Abundant usage of hotkeys, good crisp guis, good on screen information. Unlike so many UIs that make the player feel like they're swimming in molasses, everything here is sharp, responsive.

Mechanics:

-Good leveling up/progression mechanic, with caveat it has same problem as many grind games - overly difficult early on, overly easy late game; once you're over that inflection point. This could be fixed by having things like more difficult orders late game (multi-items, etc), but then a more capable staff to compensate.

Artwork:

-As mentioned in the lede; it's really not my style, so I can't really factor it in the the review; my points score is simply a tally of other non-art categories.

Dialogue/story:

-Quite good, though the characters do have the typical harem/anime tropes, when you get past that - they're all pretty likable and have enough personality to tell them apart. One downside is things seem to get cut prematurely short, though I'm sure this will be a matter of time before game is more fleshed out.

I particularly liked Cynthia and her interactions with the MC - this is one of maybe 2-3 games on the entire site that actually does wifesharing/hotwifing right, mc's not jealous, there's no element of humiliation, and despite having tons of sex elsewhere she's still very much in love with the MC, so kudos to the dev/writer for this, too many wifesharing games feel like they're written by ntr lovers, not wifesharing lovers.

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In summary, solid 4/5 - there are some hiccups that prevent a perfect score; story could be longer, some of the mid-late gameplay is unneccesarily grindy, needs more scenes overall, but those are offset by the fantastic UI, good core mechanical gameplay, and overall dialogue.

My honest opinion about the game.

The good:
- The writing is great, the characters are well written and their personalities are very distinguishable. The "bad" jokes are good, I had some great laughs in the 30 hours I played the game.
- The graphics are great, the character models are interesting and varied, the animations are well done and give life and dynamics to the game.
- The sex scenes are excellently written, very exciting and realistic, long enough for the player to have a pleasurable experience but short enough not to make the player bored from reading too much.
- The skins for the cafe are great, not only changing the look of the place but also the clothes and images of the maids when you use their special skills.
- NTR is optional! If you don't like it, you won't see NTR, but you'll be missing out on a good portion of the game's scenes.
- The gameplay loop is fun and dynamic, even challenging at times, and all gameplay pieces mesh together organically in almost all cases.

The bad:
- Little information about the mechanics of the game hurts the experience, especially for new players. For example, I still don't understand why and what some statuses are for and if they are already implemented. I only found out after 15 hours of gameplay that you can use keyboard shortcuts to choose food/drinks/skills/maids without having to drag the choice with the mouse (yes, I didn't press Esc even once while the cafe was open, in 15 hours of gameplay). I also didn't understand what the "Help in the Back" skill does exactly.
- You cannot select a menu without first closing the open menu, this seems like a small thing but it is extremely inconvenient and hurts the dynamic experience that other parts of the game give you.
- The game doesn't pause when you open the guest book while the cafe is open, and for someone who has reading issues like I do, this hurts the game experience a lot.
- Being limited to 3 spaces for maids to work in the cafe when you have access to 4 available maids and 4 tables to serve customers is too inconvenient, especially when some customers cannot remain unattended for 2 seconds.
- Customers ordering something that is not in stock over and over again without stopping ends up hurting progress a lot at the beginning of the game.

I'm giving 5 stars because even with the bad things I had a lot of fun and I know that in the future the developer will solve these problems.

That's all I remember about the game while writing this review.
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The game overall is great. Regularly updated throughout the month with new content and listens to feedback. Only issue I have is that the project is going in many directions too quickly. For example, Cookie only has one client-related event and there is no aftermath for it yet, whereas Cynthia and Rai have at least two each and they're fully completed. (I don't really count the gangbang with Cookie x Cynthia as a part of this because it's an additional aftermath to Cynthia's.)

I realy want to give the game 5 stars.. but i have to give it 4 stars (for now)
coz the lack of porn content.

The game is pretty grindy .. don't get me wrong .. i like to "earn" my progress .. but with the lack of porn content it's just not rewarding enough (at the moment)

The backrooms .. in general a good idea but also not rewarding enough ... some rooms are pretty expensive and the +income is a joke...also a few "real" scenes for the glory hole/vip room would be nice.

sorry for my bad english

Great game, love the fast paced gameplay and very frequent updates.
CG's look great plus most of them are animated.
Game is very engaging. I played multiple hours over many days.
Art 4.5/5
Story 4/5
Gameplay 4/5
Fapability 5/5
Music 4/5
DevSupport 5/5
Originality 5/5

I think my problem with this game is that it requires too much effort. You'll constantly have to keep on top of supplies (which is fine by itself) but also have to constantly cram food into your customer's pie hole. Of course this is on top of managing your girls and trying to make them get the customer's info for scenes or whatever. Did I mention its all real time?

H scenes are fine I think. Nothing bad or good. The NTR is the light netorase kind which really depends on your taste. But it's really just easier to read a netorase doujin if that's the case.

TLDR too much work for too little pay off.

Held off trying this game (as I usually do), until there was a decent amount of content. I finally downloaded it yesterday and can't stop playing. This game is a gem! And it is a *game*, not a VN. The main premise is that you manage a maid café and have to assign girls to clients and server them food & drink. The gameplay is pretty good but the standout is the girls - the LIs are all lovely and have unique personalities (Rai best girl). The H-scenes are hot and the optional NTR is very well done. Writing is pretty good too, only noticed a few typos. Checked out the dev's Patreon & Discord and he seems to engage with the community. From what I can tell the game is updated regularly. 5 stars and I'm now a patron. Can't wait for more updates!

can be too grindy for some people but damn is this good. The scenes are pretty cool and the gameplay itself is pretty entertaining, would still probably enjoy it without H content, and that's not common

One of the best games on the site. Fun overworld activities in the shop with lots of customers and animations. The different outfits and actions add a lot to the experience. I'm looking forward to the finished product!

[Rev @ Secret Care Cafe [v0.7.30 Public]

I keep tryin this, but something just isn't clicking for me.

Art's fine.

Writing is fine; scenario isn't blazing new trails but isn't overdone, voice and fluency are fine, characterization is good.

Porn was fine if sparse; swinging / sharing / NTR are the reason I clicked into this thread but somehow the scenes I got don't feel like they have lasting effects: maybe that's the point but it put a feeling of inconsequence in the back of my mind that colored things.

I feel the gameplay got in the way. I'm not a huge fan of these whack-a-mole realtime things and am not good at them, and kept feeling like it was in the way of my porn. If not already present, having the girls at higher lewdity be more clingy with customers (lapdances, hidden sex, etc) might help bring the porn back to the fore. If it is present, I didn't run into it so it might need to have the threshold tweaked.

TLDR: Quality game but I just couldn't mesh with it: it's not you it's me.

I like this game a lot. Although it has the worst version of ntr where mc likes when his girlfriend cheat on him, it definately deserves high rating. Gameplay is fun and unique for me and girls are great