What if you had the opportunity to live in a world with cute fluffy-eared neighbors? What if you owned your own cafe in a laidback village? What if you got to make your own relaxing handcrafted tea blends and cute deserts to share?
… What if everyone around you was dying?
Kemono Teatime
Developer: Studio Lalala, Kotoneiro
Publisher: Studio Lalala, FURYU Corporation
Platforms: Windows PC (Reviewed), Nintendo Switch
Release Date: September 4, 2025
Price: $12.99
Kemono Teatime is the latest title from FURYU Corporation label Studio Lalala. Players take on the role of Tarte, the only “human” girl living in a town with “kemomimi” neighbors. Tarte lives with her sister Macaron, a young catgirl who loves to cook and bake deserts. Together, the two of you run Cafe K, the most relaxing hangout in the commune of La Bete.
This might be considered spoilers, but you learn early on that people aren’t born as kemomimis. Rather, the transformation is the result of a pandemic which began a year ago. Within that year, things have gotten strange. Very strange.
Humanity has spread out into disparate communes with varying and eccentric philosophies, at the center of it all is the pharmaceutical company Ataraxia who produces “tablets”. Tablets are a food source that has taken hold as a stable worldwide in the wake of the pandemic, likely due to the massive death of the disease causing a collapse of agricultural infrastructure.
So rather than a commune, it’s almost safe to say that La Bete is more of a… hospice.
I know I’ve hit you with a lot of information, but all of this is revealed within the first several days of the game. What we can take away from this is that rather than a comfy slice-of-life story, Kemono Teatime is post-apocalyptic sci-fi and honestly borders on horror.
This isn’t a cynical horror borne out of a deconstruction of the genre like Doki Doki Literature Club. Instead this is an earnest sci-fi story that uses the comfy cafe as a vehicle to be told. The characters have diverse personalities and preferences, which helps the cafe feel more alive whenever guests show up.
However there’s a problem with the wide variety of guests and tastes, you only start the game with a handful of teas and herbs. Kemono Teatime relies on light puzzle mechanics to give the game some friction and it’s the primary way you navigate the game. Blending the correct tea will increase your relationship with your customers and you can learn more about them and steer yourself towards different endings.
On its own, solving what tea your customer wants is easy. The hard part is being able to predict the future. At the end of each day, Quiche, one of the game’s main characters will offer you one of three (semi-)random items, these range from neat novelties and achievement bait that doesn’t do anything, to the more important teas and herbs to diversify your stock.
The only problem is that you don’t know who’s going to ask for what and when on your first playthrough. No Blintz, I don’t have Nepal tea, in fact I can’t recall Quiche ever offering it to me until after you’ve already asked for it the past three days, go kick rocks.
This leads to the inevitable situation that without any kind of third-party guide, almost everyone who plays Kemono Teatime will get the bad/normal ending on their first playthrough. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, plenty of games rely on multiple endings for replayability, and with secret future knowledge you can achieve a different ending.
There’s just one more problem. Replaying Kemono Teatime is a slog. Even with Skip activated, the dialogue can feel slow with all the cute minor animations that punctuate scenes and delay the next text box. Not to mention there’s dialogue choices you have to make, and they’re TIMED.
Not only are they timed, but they go so fast. I consider myself a pretty adept reader and I barely had time to process some of the questions before being compelled to pick a response. Maybe it’s easier for Japanese speakers.
These factors make it difficult to want to run through the game again, which is a shame because the story is fantastic. I want to know more, I want to discover the truth behind the kemono virus, the tablet company, but I just can’t get excited about replaying everything from day one all over again.
Not only that, but there’s no guarantee I’ll make the right choices, or be offered the right items by Quiche again for a good playthrough. I could screw things up on day two and not realize my run is doomed until the very end.
The visuals are great, cute characters and plenty of animation to keep things exciting. Tarte looks a little funny during the tea preparation but I am choosing to ignore it.
The music is great, it reminds me a lot of Snail’s House, so if you like chill electronic instrumentals you’ll actively enjoy this soundtrack. The advertised “ASMR” bits are just Tarte’s voice actress making little sounds during the tea process, yeah it sounds good, but doesn’t give ASMR tingles for me, and it’s too short to actually relax to.
Ultimately, Kemono Teatime is a borderline masterpiece that’s throttled by a lack of quality of life features to accommodate replayability. I loved the story, I loved the music, I loved the visuals, but after one playthrough I’ll just wait for a guide before going back in.
