All Hail The Avocado - Hipster Café Early Access Lives!
If this is what a Hipster Café actually plays out as, I’m off to put on my ill-fitting jeans, wax my moustache and grab that vintage Olympus loitering on my Scandinavian honeycomb shelf: it’s time for some #hashtags.
useful slug’s sandbox massively delivers on innovative, witty, relaxing gameplay. I’m aware that I often make a snide comment about simulation/management games and their link to dead grandparents, but this Hipster Café is entirely yours. That said, you can give your folks a call in-game when you’ve made a boo-boo.
The aim is to cater to one of the most fickle clientele: hipsters. You only have to look at #socialmedia to see what people are like. I’m a people too, but I’d like to think I’m consistent with my tastes. One moment you’ll be serving chicken fillets and pineapple rings in a dog bowl, followed by skinny lattes illustrated with a creamy helmet. Not that kind of game.
The menu in Hipster Café is your design, with the food outclassing the fancy coffees. Serve your dish on a square plate, but later it’s a shovel, kidney bowl or even urinal, and add a variety of meats, plant-based, and the leading food group: biscuits. Ingredients are manually added in a #physics-based environment, meaning you can make a ridonkulous tower burger until it topples. However, pay attention to Johnny Public, or they won’t tip or complain about the queues.
Additionally, there’s a range of coffees (I don’t know the difference – bloody posers), and you can change the body, bitterness and brightness, but more importantly, you can draw on the top. There are only so many dicks you can draw until you meet the customer’s demands. That said, drawing a pair of pants ten times until realising they meant the American version of trousers was a nuisance. Once done with your menu, you can name it, but the generated ones are excellent.
In principle, a Hipster Café is about food and drink, and while that’s a core part of it, the entertainment value is paramount. No, it’s not about live bands and balloon animals – your customers will be expecting hotel capsules, Peloton machines, ball pools and mini-golf. Each equipment piece will fulfil their needs – the further your research, the more content they’ll be with their fun-based, music-infused, serious-minded selfie setpieces.
We go deep in Hipster Café when it comes to research. You can’t simply start with everything on the menu, so you must research. While the #toffs are in taking filtered photos of their filtered coffee, you have to keep an eye on the thought bubbles of each customer, paying attention to their needs. Sometimes having identical units, i.e. a row of darts, will fulfil them, but why not research the best gear and do it in one? Running out of space? Buy the buildings next door.
Money comes from the punters, so get their orders right, and they’ll tip you. Aside from Hipster Café having a gauge for their happiness and demands, they’ll have a money meter, too, so make sure you have enough ‘stuff’, and you’ll be able to expand and buy new gear. Also, we all know that hipsters are deep and look beyond the surface, so gut out your digs with some swank old coffee machines, rainbow flags and swordfish, and they’ll be coming in their droves. ‘Coming’ as in arriving, you filthy pirate.
More customers mean more money, but you want the virtual ones, too, as that will raise your profile. That’s where social media pops up again, in the form of the platform Tooter. Here, you can #piggyback off popular hashtags, respond to challenges, such as having a specific item on the menu, or entertain esteemed guests like Warren Buffet. I’m not very good at social media – art imitating life – but you can make a difference and follow me on Twitter. useful slug, too. #isthisthingon?
Hipster Café is arguably an endless sandbox – even in its Early Access state. There were a few niggles of slowdown once I fully expanded my premises and when there were a lot of punters in. I’d liked to have had the option to lay down multiple items – i.e. the kitchen counter – without manually selecting. Those were my only negatives, though. Even when I maxed out the food menu with the illustrious avocado, the combinations were endless and dare I say; I was getting a kick out of concocting some monstrosities and then taking a picture of them. Oh my god. Am I a hipster? What have I become…?
