Zipp’s Cafe is a short-form prologue game with heart

destructoid.com:

One of the major reasons that 2020’s Chicken Police: Paint it Red lives on in my head is because of how obviously the setting and characters are loved by the writers. It’s easy to ignore any shortcomings when the passion for the project is so infectious.

The follow-up, Chicken Police: Into the Hive, currently has a vague release date of 2024. That means it’s anywhere from a long time to very soon that we’ll be seeing it. In the meantime, The Wild Gentlemen have been able to fit in the development of Zipp’s Cafe, a short-form prologue game to keep us satisfied until its arrival. Not only that, it’s an attempt by The Wild Gentlemen to create more media based around the “World of Wilderness” setting that they started with The Chicken Police.

It’s easy to wonder why such a game is necessary. However, after playing it, the answer seems to be, once again, that the developer just loves their world and characters so very much.

Perhaps surprisingly, you don’t need to have played Chicken Police: Paint it Red to get into Zipp’s Cafe. While it does make reference to the events of the first Chicken Police game, any major bits of backstory are provided as context, and the political landscape of both Clawville and the greater Wilderness settings are described both in dialogue and in a notebook.

The game centers around the eponymous Zipp’s Cafe run by the also eponymous Zipp. Previously, it was known as the Hop Dog, but Zipp decided to class up the joint. It’s located smack between the insect slums known as “The Hive” and the rest of Clawville. The insect population of Clawville has long been the victim of racism from the rest of the city’s animal population, and in recent years, they’ve all been driven into the singular district that