So I'm in my room surrounded by vanilla cough drop wrappers and crumpled Kleenex, and I'm looking through the Steam Next Fest charts for a demo to play. My chest is aching, my throat feels like I've been eating tree bark, and my snot – well, I won't get into it, but it's not good. I'm sick, OK? And the kinds of bullet hell, roguelite purgatory, and hack-and-slash heaven I usually like to play in aren't good for being sick. You see, I had no choice but to put my misgivings about anime catgirls aside and download Kemono Teatime
What can I say? Respiratory infection makes me feel vulnerable. Listening to kitty cat waifus whisper ASMR, as you do in Kemono Teatime, isn't a go-to hobby of mine, but I just microwaved macaroni and cheese. I'm on my third cup of lavender tea, and I still sound like a walrusgirl. You have to put your pride aside in moments like these.
And I'm glad I did. Kemono Teatime, intriguingly, appears just as skeptical as I am about the genres it's inspired by – cafe sims with their aggressive calm and visual novels, with their cherry blossom blushing anime girls.
It's almost immediately apparent. I spent my 40 minutes with the Kemono demo opening Cafe K, a tea and dessert shop run by the human girl Tarte and her little sister Macaron, who recently grew a tail. Though the inviting shop is located in the seemingly picturesque commune La Bête, a haven for kemonomimi humans with animal ears, something sinister clearly lurks under the community's sweet surface.
As I served healing teas with herbs – a process illustrated by soft, sensory bubbling and stirring – cafe guests would reveal glossary terms I could then refer back to in my menu. By doing this, I learned that Kemono Teatime's universe had spent the last year plunged in a pandemic, which caused governmental collapse worldwide and dwindled the human population down to 20%.
"Various rumors about the virus' origins have cropped up," in-game text says. "While some say that it was a spontaneous act of
CAT
hack-and-slash
Pride
wellness
community
infection