Oh no, the anime cat girls are winning me over: the coziest demo in Steam Next Fest might be this cafe life sim with coffee ASMR
Kemono Teatime is eerily relaxing

So I'm in my room surrounded by vanilla cough drop wrappers and crumpled Kleenex, and I'm looking through the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询: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?ඣ 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
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 prideও 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 lo⛄cated 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 vir🗹us' origins have cropped up," in-game text says. "While some say that it was a spontaneous act of nature, others belie✅ve it to be a biohazard created by pharmaceutical companies." Stranger, then, is the fact that Cafe K's customers pay in blue-and-white pills. All of La Bête's residents seem so preoccupied with death…
I am, too; after all, I'm sick. So, because of my, let's say, fragile disposition right now, I don't think the best thing about the Kemono Teatime demo is its sugary plates of cookies or pantries full of chocolate and cream cheese (which you buy with pills!). Though, the game's pixelated art style cert🦹ainly makes all of its sim elements delightful.
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I'm more intrigued by Kemono Teatime's clever ability to demonstrate that fear can pop up anywhere, in anything – even in a fuzzy pair👍 of kitty ears.

Ashley is a Senio𒆙r Writer at GamesRadar+. She's been a staff writer at Kotaku and Inverse, too, and she's written freelance pieces about horror and women in games for sites like Rolling S🦹tone, Vulture, IGN, and Polygon. When she's not covering gaming news, she's usually working on expanding her doll collection while watching Saw movies one through 11.
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