Is Tailside the Cosiest Café Game on Steam?

A coffee shop sim with no timers, gorgeous decor unlocks, and beautiful art. Tailside is the cosy café game I've been waiting for.

One of the things I love doing at the weekend is heading for a long walk with my dog, and finding a café to sit in to warm up and feel cosy for a while. I’ve tried so many café management games to replicate this feeling in a game, but almost all of them turned into a panic-fuelled nightmare. Until Tailside.

I picked it up knowing it was a coffee shop sim in Early Access, and with mild scepticism due to the aforementioned bad experiences. What I found was something that felt like popping in for a coffee after a rainy walk. Six hours in, and I’m not even close to being bored.

If you want to see how it starts before you commit, I played the first hour over on my YouTube channel. It's part of my Lunch Hour Playthrough series, so it's exactly the right length to watch on a break:

Tailside is a coffee shop sim, but it’s not there to make your palms sweat. There are no timers or punishments for taking too long, getting an order wrong, or just pottering around and tidying up. You make drinks at your own pace, serve your customers when you’re ready, and the game lets you relax. For anyone who has bounced off café management games because they turned into a stress fest, this is something different (finally!)

Tailside is also a decorating game, a brilliant surprise for me as these are my favourite types of game. As you make drinks and build up XP, you unlock furniture and decor for your café, and there is a lot of it! I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time rearranging things to get my café looking exactly right, and the game is generous enough with unlocks that it always feels like there’s something new at the end of each in-game day. There’s a cute terrace to unlock and personalise too, which I’m very much enjoying.

There is also a skill tree mechanic where you can gain recipes for new drinks (I love the Honey Latte), speed up your processes and optimise your flow which I found really helpful and rewarding.

And then, of course, there are the plushies.

Every day you get a ticket for a surprise plushie. You don’t know what you’re getting until it arrives, which gives the whole thing a lovely little collectathon energy. You can display them in your café or up in your apartment above it, and I still haven’t decided exactly what to do with mine yet. The apartment detail is one of those things that sounds small but it adds so much. You don’t just run this café, you live there. It’s your whole world, and that intimacy is a big part of why the game feels so restorative to play.

The latte art mini-game is the only place where Tailside loses me slightly. It’s slow, and the designs repeat enough that it starts to feel more like a chore than a pleasure. That said, I later unlocked a skill that completes the latte art automatically, and this is the kind of thing I love about a developer who’s clearly paying attention. Problem more or less solved, and it’s a good example of how the game rewards patience.

The other caveat is Steam Deck. It’s playable, but I had crashes and control issues, and it doesn’t feel like the experience it should be on handheld which is a shame, because this is the kind of game you want to curl up with on the sofa. The developer is actively working on this, so it may well be a non-issue by the time the game is in full release. On PC it was faultless, and that’s where I’d point you for now.

After nearly six hours I’ve encountered maybe two bugs total. For Early Access, that’s impressive. This doesn’t feel like an unfinished game to me, it feels like a game that’s still growing, which is a very different thing.

If you want a café game that treats your free time as something to be enjoyed rather than optimised, Tailside is exactly that. It’s warm, it’s pretty, and you can dip in for 10 minutes on your coffee break (geddit?) or lock in for 4 hours straight. I’m already looking forward to whatever the full release adds.

My final verdit: ★★★★☆ (sort the Steam Deck support and we’re straight to a five).

Tailside is available now for 50% off in Early Access on Steam.