The unbalanced nature of this game is what brings me to not recommend this after 100% completing all the achievements.

Cat Cafe Manager is what it sounds like: a cozy game to manage a cafe, collect cats, and build friendships to learn a story. You grow your cafe, make food/drinks, find cats, upgrade stats, upgrade skill trees, and learn how to stop a business from desecrating a cat shrine. You buy ingredients, decorate your cafe with different furniture sets, buy lures to find stray cats to collect, hire people, manage your inventory, and learn about your grandma.

Unfortunately, this is one of the least balanced cozy games I've played in a while that also lacks in game design and excels more in art and animation. The animations can look smooth and the art is pleasing, but the gameplay is lacking and sometimes frustrating.

Some qualms I've had throughout the game:
- Quite early on in the game once you get workers (should be relatively early), the game essentially becomes an idle game with no way to skip days or quicken the pace. The game tries to discourage that by having "friendship stories" associated with certain furniture, but this furniture is not available until much later into the game. At that point, you're just waiting for the NPCs to get to the table and scroll past their dialogue because you've done everything else.
- The skill tree is pretty bad because although you receive "delight" to branch your skills, you end up maxing out the entire tree much earlier before you're even able to afford what you've unlocked. Because the system uses around 6 or so types of currency to afford different things, there will be times where you're having to focus on earning one currency over the rest. I normally like management like this, but the earn-rate is so wildly different than the skill tree that even caring about what to pick over the other is nearly pointless since you'll achieve much of it before unlocking most of the design or cat collecting capabilities. More on this later.
- The earn-rate increases exponentially AFTER you complete the main story because your seat limit and thus your customer limit MORE THAN DOUBLES after that WITHOUT EARNING OR UNLOCKING IT THROUGH "DELIGHT". However, this STILL won't take into much effect due to having to purchase the chairs (and therefore trying to speed up post-main-story gameplay is not smooth because it's slow in other areas). This is also coupled with the fact that even at the max size of your cafe, you will STRUGGLE to fit 50 chairs if you also plan to buy one of every decor item in each furniture set (which is a common sentiment considering that you can theme your rooms with different walls and floors. There is no need to stick to just one furniture set for the whole cafe. Only committing to one set will also put you at a stat disadvantage). This makes decorating difficult. You're probably going to seat people near litter boxes or forgo design choices because of the lack of space. More complaint later as well.
- Some furniture sets will have much more themed furniture than the other. Not only that, but some sets will be essentially incomplete as viewed by the player. For example, the Halloween-type Harvest/Witchy decor will have all the appropriate appliances and decor types to complete a set. But something like the hipster-type decor will not have a matching door or window. Because some furniture sets are much larger than others and more diverse, you may end up having to resize your themed room so that you cannot achieve much symmetry, equality between room sizes, etc. Having bathrooms are almost pointless since there's not much a requirement for them either.
- Remember when I complained about the skill tree because of the pacing? It also affects cat stat boosters and effects that each cat can have. Some cats can only be gotten later in the game, but their effect will boost you for every skill tree upgrade you achieve. Doesn't really make sense to really be able to get this AFTER you completely upgrade your skill tree, so the effect becomes useless. I've noticed some cats have affects that actually don't trigger properly (like giving a lot of gold whenever a customer leaves). And some stat boosters are EXTREMELY unbalanced. One cat can have boosters than can get their stats to the 20s-30s while other cats might be pretty much useless staying in the single digits. You have to manage your "cat limit" to around a max of 7ish and they encourage you to put some for adoption before hitting that post-main-story-line. But post-main-story, it jumps to 23. You can re-adopt the cats you released, but why even put a warning saying that once you put them up for adoption, it is permanent... if it isn't? This warning about permanency appears even after your limit is 23 (all the cats available). This affects how you feel about releasing cats quite early on when in reality, the warning should've been a note that you could readopt them later in the game.
- All cats share their upgrade points pool and all workers (including YOU) share their own as well. This means that you will have to take turns neglecting certain people and you do not level up separately from your workers. You most likely will opt to specialize in skills for certain workers for the stat boosts every 5 levels (or 3 levels for cats) and neglect yourself since the game becomes an AFK game mostly. And most of the time, your skills will be much lower than needed anyway.
- In addition to the furniture sets, the design can be buggy. Even in design mode, removing walls can still make it difficult to see certain furniture if there's an outdoor divide between rooms. Sometimes some furniture can bug out in certain positions. For example, an Eastern sink turned around will actually show the hipster sink. Or some decor extend much further past their sprite box. Furniture like counter appliances that should match up do not, sometimes sitting on a completely different line and thus not having a smooth connection. Even wall art is usually obscured unless no furniture is in front of it (like a poster being 90% hidden by a counter that doesn't even reach halfway up the wall).
- Once you hit the max 50 chairs (which is a struggle to fit in and of itself), performance really suffers. It is almost necessary to reduce the graphics resolution because of how poor it runs. Not only that, but my game has crashed in design mode before because it cannot handle things like removing many furniture at once. There's times when there are obvious bugs such as the friendship gauges displaying different amounts despite being at max level with someone as well.
- Achieving the needs of your cats also pretty much requires you to only have the most expensive of the beds/toys/food bowls if you choose to keep all the cats. This makes you have to forgo style choices if you like the look of a different litter box or food bowl. Achieving the needs for these cats also force you to give yourself and the customers the minimum amount of space if you also want to have all the furniture they provide. This can easily be repaired by adding a second floor WITHOUT ADDING A MILLION OTHER FURNITURE PIECES. The cafe size is not very proportional to what they offer you.
- Dialogue can be long, draining, and pointless since there's no real reason to pick one choice over the other. There is no customization to your outfit, your workers' outfits, etc. There are no mini-games. You're essentially just completing an AFK game. There is no real reason to even provide bathrooms, achieve your cats needs, or get a good grade of service for the day. You will get money and you can just let the game play on. It's much less of a game and feels more like a project of an artist that wanted to make a game just to make a game. Even when you choose your first cat, there's no real choice in that either because you will collect the other two pretty much immediately.

Cute art that pretty much fails at a game.

Cute game that is relatively mindless. Collect cats, talk to people.

Good simple cafe sim, has fun ones too.