Dragon Caffi – Spotlight
After collecting recipes and making three-star dishes, you can exchange them for 100 Sky Train tokens back at the Dragon Caffi. The game’s plot is fairly straightforward. There’s no real overarching plot other than Margo’s desire to ride the Sky Train, and the game is far more focused on atmosphere, puzzles, and mini-games than any real characterization. Margo has a positive outlook on life, is a stickler for details, and is always willing to help others. She’s an engaging lead character who you’ll want to root for as you help her collect recipes, dishes, and other in-game currency.
The game’s atmosphere was the first thing that drew me in. You can see why it’s so popular, with its Studio Ghibli-esque designs and a diverse cast of characters. From Sandy Shores to Haunted Hallow and Rainbow Ridge, Margo’s colourful world has a different theme and new quests to explore for each neighbourhood, but they all feel like they belong together. You’ll never get bored of the game’s neighbourhoods because there are always new ones to explore as you progress through it.
I’ll also admit that, despite my admiration for the Dragon Caffi’s design, I was worried that the entire game would look like Howl’s Moving Castle because of the flying house on metal legs. However, this is not the case. The 2D animation is clean and crisp, and it fits the story perfectly. The character designs are all unique as well, which adds to the overall appeal. Dragon Caffi’s world is filled with a wide variety of inhabitants, including dragons, axolotls, small birds wearing kerchiefs, and whoever the hell Phineas and his friends are. Dragon Caffi stands apart from Studio Ghibli’s whimsy while still retaining a similar tone. It’s also worth noting how beautifully decorated the baked goods are. There are no two alike, and they’re all dragon-themed and breathtakingly beautiful to look at.
In Dragon Caffi, completing quests unlocks recipes, and the quests themselves are varied. Sometimes they’re as easy as talking to a character and telling a silly story, sometimes it’s a fetch quest and other times it’s running around completing a puzzle. To be sure, this prevents them from becoming monotonous, but some of them can be deceptively difficult to complete. The guy who wants to trade you a statue piece for a “unique doorstop” isn’t asking much, but finding the unique doorstop is a quest all on its own. My favourite was the recurring quest with Phineas and friends where you would have to play hide and seek with them in every new neighbourhood they appeared in, which was great fun.
Cooking in Dragon Caffi is its own mini-game. You’ll need to finish the game to cook your ingredients once you’ve gathered them all. There’s four strings and you need to press one of four buttons when the ingredients are over the cauldron to drop them, and you also need to avoid the bad ingredients that the zombooshies are trying to drop in to mess up the recipe. A single mistake can drop your dish from three stars to two stars and force you to re-bake your dish, making an otherwise lighthearted game feel punishing. The mini-game itself isn’t that difficult. A similar musical mini-game has the same difficulty issues, but you only need to play that one a few times.
The biggest problem with Dragon Caffi, besides the difficulty of cooking, is the sheer number of bugs. Considering it’s a two-person game studio it is to be expected, but a few of the bugs make it impossible to complete quests, such as the stepping stone puzzle that doesn’t stay lit up long enough for it to be humanly possible to complete, or the apothecary not recognising your spooky spell which you need to complete the medicine. I’m hoping that all of the bugs have been fixed by the time the game is released.
On the whole, Dragon Caffi is an enjoyable experience. Margo’s journey is enjoyable, but it suffers from a lack of difficulty settings and numerous bugs. Dragon Caffi is a fun cooking game with an imaginative feel and a variety of quests and mini-games to participate in that is well worth the flight.
