30 people found this review helpful
Recommended
0.0 hrs last two weeks / 6.2 hrs on record (5.1 hrs at review time)
Posted: 16 Feb, 2023 @ 2:45pm
Updated: 27 Feb, 2023 @ 3:04pm

Restock the shelves, serve customers, mop the floors, and pick up trash. All in a day's work at the Convenience Store and then you can go home and spend all your hard earned cash on 'Amazing' purchases and cat food. Meowjiro is an addictive time-management job-simulator game about working to provide for your pet cat… although, beware they are not what they seem.

Accuracy is required for monetary transactions, speed for others. If a task is failed or you take too long, pay will be docked. There is a steady increase in challenge but it never becomes overwhelming. In-game events announced through the news will cause certain tasks to be more prominent the following day. The second mode ‘Math Genius’ will have the player solve how much change is required instead of simply displaying the amount required.There’s no day cycle, the management aspect revolves around responding to tasks efficiently. Once the last task is completed and the last customer has left, the day ends.

The game plays comfortably and responsive using keyboard and mouse but there’s no key-rebind options. Picking up trash felt awkward (although I think this was intentional) and I found the ice cream machine a little deceptive and kept ‘dropping’ them. There is controller support but it felt too slidey trying to target menu buttons so I didn’t try it while playing the game.

The goal of the game is to feed your cats. Doing so will allow you to obtain more cats with in total to collect. I feel this side of the game wasn’t clearly explained in-game and what I’m about to say might be a spoiler for those wanting to go in blind. Feeding your cats will increase scores of meat/water/fish/chicken and reaching certain score combinations will cause a new food item to be available for purchase (this will also fully reset the scores). These items when consumed by a cat will spawn a new cat. You can check score requirements in the ‘Pedia’. I adore how the designs and how they aren’t just different colours! Many of them reminded me of those found in Kekeflipnote’s whimsical meme interpretations of ‘Strange Cats’.

You are given your own apartment which will slowly be expanded from a cupboard to something habitable as you gain more cats. You can sit here as long as you want between work days watching the cats do their thing, as well as reading the news, making purchases and catching up with emails on the in-game phone. There are a few items that can be purchased to furnish the living quarters. The items have set places where the options are usually choose between two to three styles or not at all. It feels very limited and I would like to see more items especially for the cats.

I had a good time playing this game, I genuinely couldn’t stop until I had all the cats! It was very satisfying to complete busy days with no mistakes. There’s lots of charm in the variance and in the little details of the cats, the customers, the purchases and the trash left behind. Watching the items customers pick up seem to match which shelves they visited. I was absolutely shocked when a dog came into the store and peed however, I thought he was going to be a gimmick and buy something but no, just peed. I completed the cat-pedia by day 27 (approximately 3 hours) and had all the achievements by day 40 (approximately 4.5 hours).
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