Little Dragons Cafe defies categorization. Despite being the latest endeavor from Harvest Moon creator Yasuhiro Wada, it's not a farming sim. While you have to manage your cafe, keeping the staff in line and adjusting the menu to fit your needs, it's also not really a management sim. You instead split your time between exploring with your dragon to hunt down recipes and ingredients and going hands-on at the cafe--and they combine to make a strangely satisfying loop. But Little Dragons Cafe is also held back by frustrating pacing problems in its story and progression, as well as technical hiccups that make it feel outdated.
In Little Dragons Cafe, you're one of a pair of twins whose mother has fallen into a deep sleep. You learn that she's part dragon, and in order to save her, you need to raise a dragon while also running the family cafe. You meet new cafe customers with problems of their own, and one by one, you help each of them through their struggles (mostly using food) to progress. There's a lot of silliness and cheerful platitudes throughout the story, and they're largely sweet, if a little corny; one customer, for example, is an angry young girl who learns to better understand her father through a comforting shrimp dish.
Each character's story is broken up into around a dozen short scenes, usually one per day. Early on, you'll only be able to explore the area immediately around the cafe; unlocking new areas is dependent on your dragon's size (two physically small stages and two stages that you can ride and fly on), which is in turn dependent on your progression through the story. The pace of the story lags behind that of exploration, and you'll find yourself ready to move on, having found every recipe and ingredient in the early areas, before the story structure will allow you to. The slowness feels forced and artificial, rather than a choice you make to fit the game's relaxed pastoral setting.
This early section is also dragged down by janky movement controls. You can jump, but it's clumsy, and you'll often have to tweak where you're standing slightly to actually get onto something. A hilly area in particular is filled with ledges you can jump down from but not back onto, forcing you to backtrack multiple times to reach everything on foot. Despite all that, though, you'll still outpace the story.
Little Dragons Cafe improves a lot once your dragon can fly. New regions, like a rocky cliffside set to upbeat music and a more subdued waterfall filled with rare ingredients, provide more variety in both your day-to-day exploration and in your cafe's menu. Flying eliminates all the problems with navigating on foot, and it becomes faster and easier to gather everything you need over the course of a day. Your cafe, too, becomes busier; you'll likely run out of ingredients faster than you can gather them, and you either have to consistently harvest what you need or plan your menu around what you have on hand. It's a satisfying balancing act that keeps you heading out day after day, even after you've thoroughly searched each area.
Creatively, cooking itself is a short rhythm minigame in which your accuracy helps determine the quality of the dish. The prompts often seem to be just off-beat, but the game is also forgiving, and creating high-quality dishes isn't difficult. The actual fun comes from coordinating your menu--in addition to regularly swapping out recipes as your ingredient stock fluctuates, you can check it to see which recipes are popular and which need to be swapped out for better ones. It's not a complex or deep system, and you don't have to try too hard to keep customers happy, but tinkering with it gives all that gathering a purpose.
You can also spend time on the actual operations of the cafe, including taking and serving orders, cleaning plates, and reining in the group of goofy weirdos that comprise the staff. While they're mostly likeable in cutscenes, the staff is not very helpful or efficient as employees and will frequently run into you and block your path as you try to complete tasks. They also slack off periodically, and while you can talk to them to get them back in line, the cafe won't suffer much for their poor performance. Generally, helping out in the cafe is busywork--the only incentive to do it is the guilt trip you might get from your sibling for shirking your responsibilities.
Little Dragons Cafe is heartwarming overall, with cute character designs and joyful music to accompany each colorful region. The dragon in particular is adorable as a baby, encouraging you to bond with (and feed) it as it grows. Unfortunately, texture shimmer, lag before cutscenes load, and limited lighting effects make it feel like a much older game than it is. The technical problems aren't obtrusive, but combined with the control and pacing issues, they do make Little Dragons Cafe feel like a much older game.
In many ways, Little Dragons Cafe doesn't really fit a modern mold. It's conservative with the goals it gives you, spacing out progression so much that it's easy to get impatient with it. None of your individual tasks are very complex or challenging, either. But when the right parts come together, it can be fun to succeed in its charming world, and it's easy to lose track of time hunting for hidden recipes or rare ingredients to make the best dishes possible. If anything, it's a lovely game to relax to--even if you're forced into a slow pace.
In 2012, Subset Games released FTL--a strategy roguelite whose best moments were when everything worked like a well-oiled machine, but also when you were frantically trying to adapt to dangerous, unexpected situations in the spur of the moment. Into The Breach, Subset's sophomore effort, again has you enacting carefully planned strategies. The difference is that when the going gets tough, Into The Breach's turn-based mechanics and tactical tools allow you to improvise precisely, and respond purposefully, with perfectly choreographed counters in an aggressive ballet that feels amazing to conduct again and again.
In a world where giant monsters called Vek threaten the earth, humanity has devised equally giant, human-operated mechs to combat them. Humanity has also invented time-travel technology to give pilots the opportunity to go back in time and start the whole conflict over, should the worst happen. You command a squad of three mech pilots whose purpose is to deter the advances of the Vek, one region at a time, through four different island stages with the ultimate goal of destroying their hive.
In each region, your primary objective is to stop Vek from causing collateral damage--each civilian building destroyed depletes part of the game's overall power grid meter, and if it hits zero, your game is over. However, Vek almost always outnumber your squad, with even more continually spawning in, which makes wiping them out entirely a difficult task. Into The Breach is a tactics game with an emphasis on deterrence and creatively mitigating damage with the limited tools at your disposal.
It's a daunting task, but there is one central feature that makes this process enjoyable and manageable: Every action the enemy will make in their next attack phase is clearly telegraphed through the UI during your turn. You can see which tile a particular Vek will hit and how much damage it will do, meaning you can assess your priorities and the response options you have available, then take direct steps to address the fated outcome. In the critical moments, just before a Vek flattens a hospital, you might dash in and tackle it out of range, and into the firing line of another Vek. Or, if your mech lacks close-combat abilities, you might move into harm's way to prevent the building from destruction. You might notice that more Vek will be spawning from the ground, and decide to throw a boulder on the tile to stop them from emerging, or shoot an off-the-mark missile, letting the explosion push another Vek on top of it.
Knowing the exact outcome of each action means that Into The Breach feels like a game of violent chess, in the best way possible. Each turn will have you pondering over possible moves and outcomes, threats you can feasibly attend to, and pieces you can afford to sacrifice--common characteristics found in any good turn-based tactics game. But because the possibility spaces of Into The Breach skirmishes are so confined (every battle takes place on an 8x8 grid, just like a chessboard, filled with impassable squares) decisions can be reached quickly, and momentum rarely comes to a standstill for long.
What also makes these decisions so entertaining to consider is not just the novelty of the way different components can interact in delightful ways, it's the certainty of how they will interact. Into The Breach is a tactical game that features a relative lack of probability, uncertainty, and risk. Attacks will always connect and do a distinct amount of damage, the grid-based scenarios mean units move and take actions in exact distances, and nothing ever occurs without at least some warning. The transparency and amount of information communicated provide great peace of mind, since every action you take will go as planned.
The only exception is that when a Vek attacks a building, there is a tiny chance that the building will withstand damage. The probability of this happening is related to your overall grid power and can be increased, but the percentage value is always so low that this rare occurrence feels more like a miracle when it happens, rather than a coin toss you can take a chance on.
The game's time-travel conceit also has a part to play here--you have the ability to undo unit movement, and each battle gives you a single opportunity to completely rewind and re-perform a turn. It's possible to execute your most optimal plan for each scenario every time, and the result is that turns in battle can feel like choreographed moves in an action movie, a confidently flawless dance of wind-ups, feints, counters, and turnabouts.
You can unlock up to eight different premade squads, each comprised of three unique units, which focus on entirely different styles of combat. The diversity here is significant enough that each team calls for distinct strategic approaches. The default squad, Rift Walkers, focuses on straightforward, head-first, push-pull techniques. The Blitzkrieg crew works best when corralling Vek together in order to execute a lightning attack that courses through multiple enemies. The Flame Walkers focus on setting everything ablaze and knocking Vek into fire for damage-over-time en masse. Each different combination of mechs can completely change how you perceive a battlefield; things that are obstacles for one squad could be advantageous strategic assets for another.
But where the possibilities of Into The Breach really open up is in its custom and random squad options, and the imaginative experimentation that comes from putting together unique all-star teams with individual mechs from different squads, along with your choice of starting pilot--whom all possess an exclusive trait. You might have a team composed of a mech who shields buildings and units, one that freezes anything on the map into a massive block of ice, one whose sole ability is to push everything surrounding it away, and a pilot that can perform one additional action each turn if they don't move. Can you complete a run of the game with that custom squad of pacifists? The game's structure makes these unorthodox options enjoyable challenges that are legitimately interesting to explore.
Into The Breach maintains a roguelike structure of procedurally generated trials and permadeath, but when a campaign goes south not all is lost. If a mech is destroyed during a battle, it will return in the next, only without its pilot and their unique trait. Too much collateral damage is game over but means you have the chance to send one of your living pilots--experience points and bonus traits intact--back in time to captain a new squad, in a new campaign. The game is difficult, but starting over isn't tiresome because your actions so directly determine outcomes, and you always feel you can improve. And individual battles are so swift and satisfying that they become a craving that you'll want to keep feeding over and over.
The clean and understated surface elements of Into The Breach complement the precise nature of its mechanics. The simple presentation, as well as the sharp UI layout, is attractively utilitarian and serves as a crucial component of the game's readability. There is no explicit plot outside of the time-traveling conceit, but the flavor text--small snippets of dialogue for each mech pilot and island leader, whom you'll encounter again and again throughout multiple playthroughs--adds a modest but pleasant facet of character to contextualize the world and round out the overall tone.
Into The Breach also shines on Nintendo Switch, where all of the content from the PC version remains intact. The game's UI and miniature battlefields, both of which scale incredibly well on different monitor resolutions, unsurprisingly make the transition to the Switch's handheld mode flawlessly. The visuals are sharp and readable, the loading times are instantaneous and on-par with the PC version, and the addition of controller rumble to accompany on-screen action serves as an enjoyable touch.
For seasoned players who have experience with Into The Breach on PC, there will be a short teething period as you become accustomed to the gamepad-centric controls--no touchscreen controls are available. The left analog stick serves as a mouse cursor replacement, but thankfully, there's a very capable and adjustable snapping behavior that comes into play during battles, which instantly centres your cursor to the middle of a grid tile and allows you to sweep across maps quickly. The face and shoulder buttons are dedicated to discrete commands, and the D-pad behaviour is also adjustable--you can either use it to instantly cycle between units (up and down) or enemies (left and right), or change it to use as a sequential tile selector.
The smart control design in the Switch version means that commands and turns can still be performed very quickly. It only took me about five islands' worth of battles before they became second nature, and I was able to come close to the speed I'm used to with a mouse and keyboard shortcuts. As a whole, the performance of Into The Breach on Nintendo Switch is very capable, which is a blessing, because the game's stellar, irresistible game design perfectly suits a device that lets you play it everywhere.
There is so much strategic joy in seeing the potential destruction a swarm of giant monsters is about to unleash on a city, then quickly staging and executing elaborate counter maneuvers to ruin the party. Into The Breach's focus on foresight makes its turn-based encounters an action-packed, risk-free puzzle, and the remarkable diversity of playstyles afforded by unique units keeps each new run interesting. It's a pleasure to see what kind of life-threatening predicaments await for you to creatively resolve in every new turn, every new battle, and every new campaign. Into The Breach is a pristine and pragmatic tactical gem with dynamic conflicts that will inspire you to jump back in again, and again, and again.
Editor's note: This review has been updated to include our experience with the Nintendo Switch version of Into The Breach -- August 30, 2018
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