Coffee, pixels and a lot of time management. Pixel Cafe is developed and published by Baltoro Games and it’s a fairly easy-going casual game with a great art style and a lot of charm.

“Step into Pixel’s shoes in this one-of-a-kind journey that bridges time, memories, and the aroma of fresh coffee. Dive deep into a city balancing its past and future. Engage in intense arcade challenges, immerse yourself in heartfelt stories, and navigate a world crafted in pixel art.”

You’ve most probably seen similar games to Pixel Cafe before, I know I have and you usually find them on mobile devices with touchscreens. There’s a very good reason why too, as I will cover later. Until then, the basics of how the game plays is, you serve customers food and beverages. These customers are on very strict time limits and you need to get their order to them as fast as possible. The faster that you complete their order, the more money you will receive. If you’re too slow, you’ll gain less money and there’s even a risk of the customer walking out.

Earn coin and buy upgrades to help you serve customers faster. Rinse and repeat until you see the story of the game out. While the gameplay is basic, it can throw up quite a challenge in later stages because things get increasingly more hectic. This is where those upgrades come in very handy. The gameplay is tied together via a story that is both great and truly awful. The visuals are fantastic and they do a lot of heavy lifting as the story unfolds. The story is a tad cliché, but the awfulness comes from the translations as there are some glaring mistakes that’ll have you reading the same word multiple times trying to work out what it is meant to say.

The main issue that I had with this game though is that it becomes almost unplayable later on, due to the controls. I was playing on Xbox and when things get hectic with you juggling between three different counters and all the various menu items with most needing several steps to finish, all while trying to serve multiple customers at the same time… you can’t be fast enough due to the controls. This is the reason why these kinds of games are usually found on mobile devices and touchscreens. You have to be fast when things get a bit crazy and you just can do that with a controller and moving a pointer around a screen from one item to the next until you get to the other side of the screen.

Due to the sluggish controls (on consoles), Pixel Cafe goes from a nice casual game, to one that quickly frustrates and annoys. Yet, I bet that this would work brilliantly on a touchscreen or PC. If you are interested, Pixel Cafe can be purchased for around £10 and it is available now on PC and all the consoles. It’s not a bad game at all, slightly above average. But, when you can download similar games for free on mobile devices, is it really worth it?