Nom Nom: Cozy Forest Café – Cozy Comfort Wrapped in Rhythm and Decoration

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• DEVELOPER: Anaïs Salla
• PUBLISHER: Anaïs Salla
• PLATFORMS: PC
• GENRE: Cozy / Rhythm
• RELEASE DATE: January 12, 2026  
• STARTING PRICE: 12,79€
• REVIEWED VERSION: PC

One thing is certain: you don’t have to think twice about picking up Nom Nom: Cozy Forest Café if you enjoy cozy, wholesome, and cute games. It fits perfectly into that niche and offers plenty of content to dive into right away. The premise is simple, you run a café in the middle of a forest, meet various animal characters, chat with them, and prepare food or drinks based on their preferences.

Naturally, games like this follow a familiar structure, and Nom Nom: Cozy Forest Café is no exception when it comes to repetition over time. However, it stands out thanks to its interesting mix of rhythm-based gameplay and light management, paired with a huge amount of decoration and customization options that you can tweak for hours.

Filled With Customization Options

From the very beginning, you’re greeted by a cozy, vibrant, and stylish aesthetic that never loses its charm, only expanding with new ideas as you progress. The game is full of color and never pressures you to rush as everything moves at a relaxed pace. Nom Nom: Cozy Forest Café follows a straightforward loop: earn money, collect stars, and complete achievements to unlock new content.

Each new animal you meet introduces additional food and drink options such as cookies, boba, waffles, soda, and coffee while also unlocking new furniture sets and color options for walls and floors. The building aspect isn’t particularly deep and mainly exists to make your café feel personal. That said, I was genuinely surprised by how much content the game offers. From hanging flowers and lamps to placing pillars and choosing décor styles ranging from kitsch to modern, there’s a lot of room to experiment.

Customization extends beyond furniture, as you can also personalize food and drinks. You’re able to change how drinks look, add ingredients, adjust cup sizes, and do the same for items like cookies or donuts by choosing flavors and add-ons. Each customer has a different daily preference, and fulfilling it rewards you with a money bonus. Money is mostly used for buying furniture, and the economic system remains intentionally simple throughout the game.

One of my favorite features, and one I think many players will appreciate, is the ability to add your own designs to almost everything. The game includes a pixel-style design editor that lets you paint and draw custom designs for drinks or wall decorations. It’s a charming addition that encourages creativity, and you can easily spend hours experimenting. Thankfully, the game keeps all your creations neatly organized in a menu, so you can reuse them at any time.

Rhythm-Based Mini-Games Can Become Repetitive

To prepare food and drinks, you must complete a rhythm-based mini-game. It’s fairly simple and doesn’t last long, adding a bit of flavor to the overall experience. Unfortunately, this is also where my biggest issue lies, it becomes seriously repetitive over time. I really wish there were an option to skip these sections, especially later in the game when I just wanted to focus on unlocking new furniture and experimenting with the vending machine.

The vending machine functions as a gacha system, dispensing capsules with random furniture and decorations. While fun at first, it forces you to replay the same rhythm mini-games repeatedly, which quickly becomes frustrating. Eventually, I found myself giving up on it altogether, as repeating the same rhythm sequence over and over just to unlock a different chair or lamp felt tedious. You can also earn furniture and decorations directly from animals by collecting stamps and earning points with them, which is a more satisfying alternative.

From pig and a frog, to shark and capybara, each character is unique and has their own way of speaking. While your interactions with them are fairly limited, mostly chatting from time to time and cleaning up their plates, they add a great deal of charm to the experience, and it’s hard not to grow fond of them. That said, one aspect I did dislike is how often the game forces you into animations, especially when customers leave the café. Watching them wave goodbye over and over again unnecessarily slows down the overall flow of the game. While it’s not a dealbreaker, it does become noticeable the longer you play.

Thankfully, not everything is as frustrating as it may sound. The game allows you to unlock new content at a fairly quick pace, which is a welcome design choice. Within the first two hours, you’ll unlock the majority of the characters, and after around four hours, you’ll likely find yourself focusing mainly on collecting furniture and decorations. As mentioned earlier, the gameplay loop itself is engaging, but it could definitely benefit from some balancing tweaks to slightly speed things up, rather than relying so heavily on repetition.

Perfect For Cozy Game Fans

I’m personally not a big fan of cozy games, as I often find them more chore-like than rewarding, without offering much depth. Nom Nom: Cozy Forest Café, however, doesn’t make you feel like you’re wasting your time. This game won’t be for everyone, and that’s worth keeping in mind, but if you’re looking to unwind after a long day or simply enjoy cute, relaxing experiences, there’s very little to lose here. More importantly, I believe this is a title many players will end up liking precisely because it doesn’t try too hard to win you over, and manages to stay interesting and engaging before repetition fully sets in.

Review copy provided by the publisher