Kuroneko Kissaten is one of my favorite circles because it tends to really keep you on your toes.
It has very specific creative tells: Girls with huge tits, often on the shorter side, very likely to be kemonomimi. However if you see their output you really don’t know what to expect next.
Let me tell you what their games have been in order of release: RPG where you recruit bunnygirls and hypnotize them with carrots, raising sim about helping a shy cow girl come out of her shell, three gyarus stuck in an island at the mercy of an ojiisan with mind control powers, students get stuck in a supernatural school situation and must leave with the help of a fox spirit, raise and manage a harem of cow girls, ojiisan cop disciplines a very bratty dog girl…
And now we’re back to a management game of sorts about growing closer to a sheepgirl and cow girl shopkeeper.
I appreciate not just the variety, but that it allows you to see the core of what drives the stories. In the end it’s all about manhandling busty girls into submission, whether it happens from mutual affection or domination is what changes, sometimes within the same story.
But there’s another element underneath it too. You can see ideas developing not just in gameplay but even in format.
Ushi to Hitsuji no Zakkaya-san puts you in a fantasy world where you’re helping a shop manned by cow girl Monika and sheep girl Sharon. You go on expeditions for materials or peddle wares in town, and the story progresses as the shop makes certain tiers of profit.
One of such events has the shopkeepers adopting a second cow girl called Eruru who becomes a little sister type.
The general gameplay idea is similar to their earlier Ushi Musume no Milk Cafe (the cow girl harem management one) but the gameplay flow is a bit more… legible. Instead of just entering an area and seeing a bar deplete while your inventory fills, you have a specific “press the kind of material you want to aim for while making sure things like health aren’t empty” sort of flow.
It really does feel like an iteration on the same idea that way. I felt less “what am I doing” through it.
Now, what makes this cool is that they’re actually iterating on TWO completely different fronts.
On top of the gameplay loop part, their last game before this one, Mesu Inu Training started doing something very cool that I’d like to see more people try out where the ero CGs are framed like manga panels that get added to the screen, but this time it has two key differences.
The first is that the resolution is now bigger which already makes the whole thing feel less cramped when you’re playing (and less blurry if you maximize the window).
But also, they added regular ero CGs alongside these ones, and what’s cool about doing that is that it sets a hierarchy of sorts that you can trace, where regular CGs are for sub events and panel CGs are for big story beats.
If I had to point to any specific snag that could be improved later it would be the telegraphing of milestones. It’s not that you lack the information about how to progress and such, it’s more that for such an important part of progress it’s very hidden-in-a-menu-y.
However, the whole thing is a good example of why I really like this type of format that DLsite thrives on. Shorter games allows you to see the different stages and even different facets of an author in that way. Hell, the main reason I play so many of these games is that I can be done with them in the time it takes me to get STARTED in a regular game.
It makes the “What’ve you been playing” question eternally awkward, but it also leads to some of the most legitimately interesting stuff I’ve seen in a while so hey.