A lovely idle game at the bottom of your screen, where you run a restaurant and farm. You'll work on short quests; there are 300 in total. It takes just a few days to complete and has no missable achievements.
Approximate time to 100%: A few days
Estimated achievement difficulty: 1/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 1
Is there a good guide available: You don't need a guide
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: No
Grinding Achievements: Yes, having all the money to buy every kitchen upgrade + having 30 staff members is a lot
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: No difficulty setting
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No
Gamepad or mouse and keyboard: Mouse
Not Monday Cafe is an idle game at the bottom of your screen. (Sadly, this one doesn't have a vertical mode.) You run a cafe with a garden where you farm your own produce. You can hire workers to tend the farm, the kitchen, and the cafe. You can also buy extensions to expand the spaces you have, and decorate the cafe and the kitchen. More premium decoration items require stars instead of money, which can be obtained in various ways, including by visiting other people's cafes. However, you don't need those items at all if you prefer to play single-player or want to unlock all the achievements. I love that there's a shelf decoration featuring a figure of Rusty from the game "Rusty’s Retirement," which introduced us to the idle games at the bottom of your screen.
I like that it had short quests to work toward and focus on. There are 300 of them! However, I really wish quests for recipes you don't have unlocked yet wouldn't show up, or show you that you don't have those recipes yet. Most of the time, they are locked behind higher kitchen equipment. What didn't help was that you could only have one menu open at a time. So you need to be in the quest menu to see the quest, remember the dish, go to the recipe menu, and search for the dish (gladly there is a search bar), to make it active or if you don't have it, go back to the quest menu and possible repeat this progress.. and again if you're unlucky. It would have been already a bit less frustrating if you could have had both menus open next to each other.
Another small thing I disliked was that the new unlocked recipe is available in your cafe right away. I couldn't find an option to have them unlock as unavailable and manually make them available if you wish to. With wanting to focus on a few recipes for the quests and only having a limited amount of garden space, it doesn't make sense to have all the recipes available in your cafe.
I spent a total of 117 hours completing Not Monday Cafe. However, this is quite long and includes a lot of idle time. And at the end, I had a big grind to get enough money for all the kitchen upgrades and hiring 30 staff in total. There are things I would have done differently knowing what I know now. For example, I had a favorite dish that only needed the prep station and made a ton of money (Fruit Salad). But I only upgraded it a few times, since upgrading dishes costs quite a lot of money, and you have to sell plenty of them to cover the costs of upgrading them back. I don't recommend upgrading many dishes, but focus on one that already makes a lot of money from the start and is easy to make. However, I should have upgraded this dish much more, so I wouldn't have to grind so many hours at the end to make enough money to buy the last few upgrades. For those looking to unlock this Fruit Salad, I think it is one of the rewards for upgrading the prep station, so I'd recommend focusing on that very early on ;).
I give Not Monday Cafe 3,5 out of 5 stars. Some things were a bit annoying, but I still had a great time!
3.5