Adorable game! And I even made the cookies from the recipe in the tea book in real life :)

Recommendation: A fun, simple adventure game involving whimsical humor interspersed with basic minigames.

Critique: This game feels a lot like the Frog Detective series of games, with a bit of Monkey Island thrown in for good measure. The similarities to Frog Detective are obvious: anthropomorphic animals of all species living together in one community, living mostly mundane but sometimes extremely absurd lives, being funny and giving the player random fetch quests. The similarities to Monkey Island are bit less obvious: some of the locations and situations seemed like homage to the Lucasarts classics.

Ultimately the game is sweet and very simple: you use the arrow keys and spacebar as controls for 95-100% of the game, maneuvering notorious recluse Teacup the Frog around the sleepy town of Little Pond, interacting with the locals and exploring the environment because she's run out of supplies despite inviting all her friends over for a tea party tomorrow. On the way, she offers to help a number of residents with elementary tasks they can't manage to complete; in exchange, some of them will give Teacup ingredients for the various teas she plans to serve at her party.

The artwork is evocative and a little weird, but it really shines in the cut scenes, in which all the artwork seems clearly hand-drawn. Movement is a little awkward, as you run into invisible obstacles in some places you don't expect and can sometimes walk through objects that should be obstacles. The interface has you press the spacebar (the "interaction key") to interact with an object when you're within that object's hit box. The problem is that the hit box is VERY small and finicky in places, so there will be times where you have to wiggle Teacup back and forth to finally focus on the one thing you wanted to examine.

In order to progress in/complete this game, you have do a moderate amount of back-tracking, re-visiting locations after certains actions or interactions have taken place. I'm NOT a fan of such things, and in certain games (like the first "Johnny Bonasera" game) they drive me crazy, but here it is tolerable, and I never felt really stuck in the game. There aren't that many locations, but you still do need to keep track of a small cast of characters so that, when one character suggests you might "talk to Steve," you remember who "Steve" is so you can talk to him (rather than going through every screen and talking to every single person until you find "Steve" again).

It's little, cute, and fun...particularly so if you like reading and/or tea.

Short, but wonderful and lovely.