Disney Villains Dream Cafe: A Little More Conversation, A Little Less Villainy…
A surprise drop for the Nintendo Switch (and shortly available after for other platforms), Disney Villains Cursed Cafe is an interesting experiment for a Disney-branded title. Take some of Disney’s most infamous villains, brew them up some potions, and talk to them! It’s a visual novel with a little bit of choice thrown in for replayability. Does this brew up a fun enough formula to carry the game through to it’s conclusion?
Disney Villains Cursed Cafe casts you as a “potionista”. You, through magical means, are transported to a potion cafe that serves some of the most famous Disney villains of all time (Ursula, Cruella de Vil, Jafar, Gaston, and Maleficent). These villains aren’t as villainous as they are in their respective movies, but still have evil aims and through brewing them various potions to help achieve those aims, you occasionally decide if giving them something else might be better for them (and possibly the rest of the world, depending on their actions).
The highlight of Disney Villains Cursed Cafe is absolutely the dialogue of the villains. Each is captured quite well, and it’s fun to see their reactions to what you say and brew them (especially if it’s not what they expected, which does sometimes lead to positive results, but not always) in addition to their interactions with each other, which can be quite snarky in a fun way. If you are here for well-written entertaining dialogue, Disney Villains Cursed Cafe will fit the bill quite nicely and with multiple endings for each villains’ arc, multiple main story endings, and certain dialogue choices ensure that you won’t see a good chunk of the dialogue in just one playthrough.
Unfortunately, if you are looking for anything else in Disney Villains Cafe, the game frankly comes up short. Mixing potions is an extremly straight-foward affair, there’s literally no challenge to it, there’s no experimentation to come up with potions besides what is in your recipe book which gets added to and you’re never short on supply. There’s nothing else to do besides talk to the villains and make them potions so if that’s getting tedious (and honestly, mid-game it was for me just a little but things start speeding up as you get further on) there’s no way to do something else and take a little break from the main action.
Your mileage with Disney Villains Cursed Cafe will truly vary. Does listening to and being catty with Disney villains for several hours (it can be finished in under six hours) sound like a hoot to you? Then I can highly recommend it. Otherwise, I’d pass on Disney Villains Cafe as it doesn’t really offer anything else.
That’s it for today, I do plan on having another post later this week so see ya real soon!
