Maid Cafe on Electric Street
The Summer of Demos - Day Twenty-Eight
Otakus are big spenders in Japan and the humble Maid Cafe - a cafe where the staff role-play as maids while they work - is a well-known element of that consumerist culture. Addressing their customers as “master” and never breaking kayfabe, people go to be immersed in the genteel fiction of the cafe as they dine, with some being based on manga or anime series. This concludes our regular segment “Catherine tries her best to explain a complex cultural phenomenon to give enough context for the rest of the article”.
After quitting your soul-draining office job, you wander from business to business looking for positions before resting at an empty maid cafe. The only employee Shiro comes by and before you know it, you’ve agreed to become the new manager of Fuwa Fuwa Cafe in exchange for the apartment upstairs. Together, you search Nipponbashi for a second maid so the cafe can reopen and get to know each other a little better.
Nipponbashi in Osaka (also known as Electric Town) is a media-lover’s paradise on par with Akihabara with all kinds of shops selling anime and video game ephemera. Some real shops like Surugaya and Super Potato have been licensed to appear in-game, but you can also relax with a Coco Cola in WoDonald’s or catch a film in HMAX if you like. There’s also the arcade Adventurer’s Tavern, named after the game’s Shanghai-based developer, where you manage to scout out your new employee Miyu.
Once you have enough staff to open, management is pretty easy. Before each day, you assign your maids to stations in the cafe based on their stats and help out where you can as the 8 hour shift meter at the top of the screen slowly fills. The game is usually 2D, but becomes 2.5D (think Paper Mario) inside of the cafe so you can keep out of each other’s way when waiting on tables. The bouncy nature of every character sprite is more pronounced in the cafe, lending the game a perky if sometimes lascivious tone. After closing, you can check out the shops and pass time until you sleep. You also can check your phone and backpack for any pressing matters or useful items.
As much as I enjoyed my time with Maid Cafe on Electric Street, the demo unfortunately had a glaring issue : on the third day you’re meant to wake up at 4 pm (stylised at 16 pm), manage the cafe for eight hours and wrap up around midnight. Whenever I started the third day, my clock was set to 0am, only progressing as far as 2 pm (stylised as 14 pm) and as it was still early, I was unable to sleep to get to the next day. This is to say that I was unable to play to the end of the demo, despite multiple restarts and reinstalls of it. If this article is out a little later than usual, I’m afraid this is why.
Besides this, there is other cruft found in the demo : the “Electric Cafe” text doesn’t fit in its logo on the loading screen, background music will sometimes just not loop and restart when you go into a different room, and I was unable to buy anything within my means when trying to pass time on the third day. The game also opened windowed with no options menu available to change this, nor the ability to save. This isn’t uncommon among demos but did make my repeated attempts to progress even slower.
Despite this, Playism has a strong line of doujin games it’s published over the years so I have faith that the full release will be much smoother. There are full demo playthroughs available on YouTube, which is how I knew I was softlocked by time in the first place, so do consider trying the demo for yourself. Maybe you’ll be luckier.
In a word : dismaid.
Maid Cafe on Electric Street is an upcoming cafe management RPG developed by Adventurer’s Tavern and published by Playism for PC via Steam, targeting a summer release. All images copyright of Adventurer’s Tavern and Playism unless otherwise stated.
This article is part of the Summer of Demos series, where I’ll be releasing a Demo Diving preview article each day in July. If you liked this article, be sure to share it with a friend or enemy. If you back me on Patreon, you get access to articles one day before they release anywhere else. If we reach £25/month before the end of July, I’ll extend the Summer of Demos into August.