For those of you who didn’t spend a lot of time in specific parts of Japan in the 00’s, maid culture used to be huge in sectors of the country. Both Akihabara and Nipponbashi enjoyed a booming business where you simply needed to encourage your workers to put on French maid costumes and you could charge a premium, and it worked ridiculously well. Maid hair salons, maid massage parlors, and, naturally, maid cafes. The cafes are the sole survivors after people got their heads on straight, but, from Aomori to Kagoshima, they still exist as fun, charming and adorable respites. Maid Cafe on Electric Street seeks to capture an element of what made those restaurants successful then and now, and does so almost in spite of itself.

Our game starts off in a fun and entirely relatable way. You are a worker at some faceless company where you don’t even have a name, just an employee number. After your boss’ berating becomes the final straw, you quit and find yourself penniless, directionless, but infinitely happier. By chance, you end up visiting a maid cafe, Fuwa Fuwa Cafe, which has lost its manager and all employees save one: the upbeat, awkward and utterly optimistic Shiro. Shiro lifts your spirits with a specialty coffee before dropping the question: will you become the cafe’s manager and save them from shutting down? Knowing NOTHING about this type of work field, you agree, and thus begins your madcap adventure to elevate Fuwa Fuwa Cafe into the best cafe on Electric Street, if not all Japan.

Also, yep, it’s that kind of game.

The development team of Adventurer’s Tavern want you to know this isn’t a simulation game, but an adventure game where you get to experience maid cafe and otaku life. This statement, while very well meaning, is a bit disingenuous. Let’s be clear: you don’t spend every waking moment inside Fuwa Fuwa Cafe like a Kairosoft sim. You get to go out, explore the neighborhood, find things you like and admire the depths of the detail that went into the creation of Electric Street. There is a smorgasboard of things to buy to help add further enrichment to both sides of the game, letting you decorate your apartment, change the music of the cafe and give gifts to your employees, who you may become closer to over time.

But here’s the thing: Maid Cafe on Electric Street hinges entirely on the simulation aspect to the point of it being the entire focus for the first half of the game. While the illusion of choice exists, if you aren’t constantly running the cafe each and every day, you not only don’t get money, but you don’t even advance the game forward. As the manager, you have to hire maids and delegate them to different roles in the cafe, though, I suppose, you aren’t just selecting a bunch of randomly generated NPCs in aprons to run Fuwa Fuwa Cafe. Instead, you have to find very specific women who will work with you, and you’ll know they’re potentially your employees because only the maids get voiced. It spoiled a little bit of the game’s surprise when I walked into a shrine and the maiden there was speaking in full dialogue instead of just text.

I have so many questions about this ghost, and none are relevant to gameplay.

Each day in Fuwa Fuwa Cafe involves getting customers in, taking their orders, feeding them and getting them out the door. Initially, the manager character acts as a secondary server, and you honestly get work done substantially better than Shiro or Miyu will (the two starting maids) because you take control and don’t respond to reactionary flags. You can designate maids to either cooking or service, and each character has different stats that make them better suited for one position or another. Keep in mind, you can always swap things up for fun or to give them some change in environment, which may encourage better results, however unexpected. This part of the game (which is the majority of the sim aspect) is dirt simple: seat, serve, repeat. Get used to it, because it’s how you make the entire game work.

Special service magic activated! That’s when we charge twenty dollars for a black coffee! Enjoy!

Additionally, you have to sort of figure out on your own what you need to do to make the cafe successful. You get a very brief tutorial about controls and utilizing the cafe, but you don’t get versed in how to make it better. If you don’t explore the city thoroughly, you won’t discover that one of your cafe’s tables is under repair, and your character can spend hours a day helping to speed along it’s recovery so you can seat more customers. Also, the bookstore will have helpful coffee recipes as well as boost books that can improve your maids’ abilities in the cafe. BUT having the recipe doesn’t mean you can make the coffee: you now need to figure out which of the shops contains the necessary ingredients.

Your coffee arsenal is crucial for Maid Cafe on Electric Street. Every so often, special guests will come, and the forward momentum of the plot and your relationship with different characters hinges on your ability to understand their order and deliver it without being told expressly what to do. While you can always improve relationships through conversation and gifts (what, you don’t bribe your employees with makeup and flowers?), these special guest interactions seem to move the needle the most and have the most desired effect on improving your connection. I definitely flubbed a lot of early orders because I didn’t find out where to buy condensed milk or other extra accouterments for the cafe.

Got it, pour this woman a shot of Everclear, it’s time to party.

Beneath the surface, Maid Cafe on Electric Street is a visual novels of sorts with a distinct presentation that both works and doesn’t. On the one hand, I really enjoy this 2.5D style of pixel art. The characters are adorable and look great in the setting of Electric Street. You have the instant photo snapshots to give you an even better idea of what they look like during certain events, but the natural setting is one that I could live inside for all time. Having spent a huge amount of time in DenDen Town, it was exceedingly charming to see this mashup of nods to iconic landmarks and places brought to life. I can say the pixel representation of Mugen Malatang is incredible in capture and detail. This was made for the fans of the world of otaku, and I mean that in the most positive way.

The soundtrack of Maid Cafe is really strong, if eclectic. You end up with a wide variety of tunes from synth to chiptune to almost orchestral, and it runs the gamut of inspiration. The nighttime vibe music has this sultry jazz feel of the 90s adult animes, and you also have these tunes inside the shops that clearly try to capture the vibe of certain locales, like Super Potato or Softmap. While the music itself is great, the looping and track change is sometimes abrupt and sharp, which can feel unpleasant when the tunes have hard transitions into other music that feels distinctly different. I still enjoyed it overall, but I feel some crossfading would have allowed the experience to be more enjoyable.

The developers apparently love the idea of almost but not quite getting sued.

And, as PLAYISM has proudly displayed, the voice work is incredible. I didn’t know how I felt about the developers hanging their hats on different voice actresses, but there’s a whole host of personalities at play, and the characters have that much more of a presence and personality thanks to their voices. While Ishikawa Yui is clearly the strongest of the group (the voice of Honoka the shrine maiden turned maid), Shiro’s actress, Hasegawa Ikumi, has done an incredible job of taking a character with a dream and hope and turning her into something iconic. Having just watched Wind Breaker, I could really admire the skills that turn someone who voiced Kotoha into this bubbly, silly, adorable maid.

Sadly, there are some small caveats for Maid Cafe on Electric Street. While the game has been getting updates constantly, there are a handful of bugs that crop up that seem very inconsistent. Text notifications will sometimes hang in the air far too long, acting as a distraction. My controller would occasionally decide I wanted to walk in the opposite direction: hardly a game where that’s a life or death situation, but annoying none the less. And, for reasons that escape me, this pixel art game is making my PC CHUG trying to load and transition between significant moments, which just feels confusing. The install size isn’t even that big, so why on earth is it such a monstrous ask on my processor?

This is not how you help anyone play video games.

Lastly, keep in mind that this is, at its heart, a romance adventure game that feels very much like a visual novel. So you’ve got four maids who, with very little provocation, can and will fall in love with the manager’s main character. And you’ll get a snapshot of them changing in the locker room for no good reason. And Miyu will put her boobs on your head at the arcade. And all of them are different fanatics for different games and anime and will lose their minds if you give them gifts or talk to them about their interests. It’s very benign compared to some harem visual novels, but it’s still eye rolling at times to realize that, if I want a good ending, I have to start hitting on my employees from a position of power, and that’s a workplace crime, yo.

Having said that, Maid Cafe on Electric Street does its best to veer away from simulation into very, very relaxed adventure game as soon as possible, and then you can experience the treat of Osaka’s geekdom haven in your own time. It’s not a game you should rush to finish, but it’s definitely not directionless. Instead, take your time, figure out what you need to do to succeed, and treat certain deadlines with respect (the issuance on day 33 should not be trifled with). If you do all that, you’ll have a lovely time, even if you just end up walking the streets, collecting figures and eating combini food. Which, to be honest, doesn’t seem like a bad life at all.

Maid Cafe on Electric Street is available now on Steam.

Reviewed on PC.

A copy of Maid Cafe on Electric Street was provided by the publisher.