Developer: Cinnamon Switch LLC

Publisher: Cinnamon Switch LLC

Played on: PC

Release Date: April 27, 2023

Played with: Mouse (Hehehe)

Paid: $0 (Gift from friend)

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Let me get one thing straight: I am not a furry.  Hey now, I see you looking at the subject of this review and rolling your eyes dismissively, ready to loudly proclaim, “Thy lady doth protest too much!”  It’s true, though, I swear!  The presence of anthropomorphism in sex doesn’t entice me to engage with it any more than the average piece of smut.  I’m not actively repulsed by it, mind you, but my casual indifference towards the presence of catgirls in my romantic fiction should hopefully speak volumes about how this kink just isn’t really my thing.

That being said (oh boy, here we go), I will give furry artists credit where it’s due: they know how to draw attractive characters in a variety of scintillating scenarios.  Sure, some or all of those characters might have ears, tails, feathers, or scales, but look: I’m pansexual and tits are tits, whether they’re on a Pornhub model or a snake lady … heaven help me, my family sometimes reads this blog.  I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m not exactly the target demographic for Mice Tea, a game about a group of friends getting stuck in all manner of sexy situations thanks to the transformative powers of some mysterious tea.  So I think it should speak volumes when I say that it surpassed my expectations and became one of the most affecting, enjoyable visual novels I’ve ever played.

  Mice Tea follows Margaret, a tea-loving twenty-something woman struggling with her self-esteem and stuck in a dead-end job at a bookstore.  She has lofty dreams of one day opening a reading cafe, but seems far too willing to go with the flow for that to happen anytime soon.  That is, until she finds a strange box of tea at her friend Gavin’s shop and, after a night of heavy drinking with her friends, decides to have some.  Next thing she knows, she’s been transformed into an anthropomorphic mouse with no clear way of getting back to her old self, and it’s up to the player to make choices to steer her story in an array of directions.

A traditional visual novel through and through, the gameplay in Mice Tea simply involves reading text and clicking to advance the story along, with occasional options popping up leading to branches in the narrative.  There are four main paths, each centred around Margaret developing a relationship with a different character, and each of those paths in turn have multiple endings.  Something I appreciated throughout was that it wasn’t obvious which path each choice would lead to; I’ve played other visual novels where the game will basically just ask, “Do you want to date person A, or person B?” and it ends up feeling very formalized and sucking a lot of excitement out of the plot.  In Mice Tea, without spoiling anything, who you end up partnering with gets influenced by seemingly unrelated decisions that nonetheless flow elegantly into their requisite paths, making every choice feel impactful.

It’s important to note that Mice Tea is equipped with a fully-functional fast forward feature, meaning that if you want to explore alternate paths, you can quickly skip through the dialogue you’ve already read and get to the juicy bits.  There’s even a great story tree feature accessible through the main menu, which shows all the possible ways the story can branch out, including which paths haven’t been explored yet.  It’s an incredibly useful feature for those who want to explore all the content on offer, and while I opted for a meticulous saving system to ensure I wasn’t missing anything, I can still see how it would be a great asset for other players.  It also shows just how much work went into really fleshing out the game’s narrative; this isn’t a simple one-and-done story, and if your playthrough is anything like mine, it’ll be well over a dozen hours before you’ve seen everything Mice Tea has to offer.

Of course, one of the biggest selling points of Mice Tea is – you guessed it – sex!  Now I’ll preface this by saying that the game does feature options to skip or warn the player before sex scenes, as well as the ability to enable content warnings and disable nude character sprites.  I didn’t play with any of these, so I can’t speak to their efficacy, but I can say that I think there’s enough on offer with the game’s narrative to where it could be worth a look even if you’re diametrically opposed to the notion of watching and reading anthropomorphic pornography.  That being said, let’s talk about sex, ba-by, let’s talk about you and Mice Tea!

With the world of kinks being so broad and far-reaching, it’s impossible for me to say that there’s something here for everyone.  However, I was truly impressed with the diversity of debauchery on display.  There’s of course the anthro stuff, but then there’s size play, bondage, exhibitionism, expansion, gender swapping, and pet play, to name a few.  In fact, now that I think about it, there’s actually no vanilla heterosexual sex in the game, which is a welcome change of pace from the overwhelming glut of “guy bangs a bunch of hot female co-eds” games on Steam.  I went into Mice Tea expecting it to be an exploration into a bunch of kinks I’m not into, but was tickled in more ways than one to find that to not be the case.  It’s a veritable cornucopia of copulation, and it was always a thrill to see what kinks would be explored next and how they’d be portrayed, even when it was something that wasn’t really my speed.

That’s largely due to how well-written the sex scenes are (as is the entire game), as well as the compelling artwork that includes everything from close-ups to x-ray views, all in the name of getting the best angles on the action short of giving the player free reign of the camera.  About the only thing that’s lacking is animation of any sort, but that can be excused for a game and development team of this size.  They also compensate by having multiple iterations of the same image so that things like fur spreading over a body or someone blowing their load can be adequately depicted through stills.  What’s also impressive is that assets are never reused; every sex scene in the game (and there are a lot of them) has fully unique artwork, all of which gets saved in an in-game gallery so you can … peruse your favourites at your leisure.

So fine, I’ve waxed poetic about the sex in the game, most of my readers have left, and anyone that remains is thoroughly uncomfortable.  Why exactly did I say at the top of this review that the game was affecting?  Well I wasn’t just talking about how it was affecting my cli- ANYWAY!  I mentioned the quality of the game’s writing in the last paragraph, but what goes on outside of the game’s pornographic moments really can’t be understated.  There’s explorations of gender identity that made me think back to my own early struggles with the subject matter.  The complexities of relationships and the anxiety of committing to dating someone is a central focus of one of the story paths.  Dealing with low self-esteem and self-worth is a central theme across all the storylines, which unfortunately is a regular fixture in my day-to-day.  There’s even conversations around kink shaming and the perceived irrelevance of certain kinks in the face of their “impossibility” that hit distressingly close to home for my own experiences.  I spent hours poring over the plotlines in Mice Tea, and by the end I found myself having to do an alarming amount of soul-searching.  Getting emotional over a silly furry visual novel with a whole bunch of kinky sex wasn’t on my bingo card for the year, and yet here we are.  And hell, while the sex scenes themselves don’t have the narrative impact of something like, say, Highway Blossoms, each includes enough check-ins and enthusiastic consent between partners to ensure they feel like more than just pure titillation.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention a couple of minor complaints.  For one thing, there’s a part in the game where a character essentially develops a split personality, and they have numerous conversations back and forth in their head.  Unfortunately, the only indication of who’s talking in many of these scenes is a change in the text box’s label and the label’s colour, which was just subtle enough of a difference for me to sometimes get the speakers confused.  I think it would have been better if the entire text box changed colour, but thankfully the writing between the characters is usually distinct enough for it to not be an issue.  There’s also a hypnotism show in one part of the game that gets a bit uncomfortable to watch.  I get that the idea is to explore different kinks relating to relinquishing control and obeying a master, but the entire thing is done in front of an audience, which makes it feel extra skeevy and voyeuristic.  The game attempts to counterbalance this when the hypnotist gives each partner an ostensible ripcord to call things off if they ever feel unsafe, but the power dynamics still felt off while playing through the segment.  On the positive side, this is offset by other areas of the story where hypnotism is used effectively to allow characters to open up and self-actualize; its usage comes off in a far better light here, and I really enjoyed all of the associated scenes.

At the end of the day, I really can’t recommend Mice Tea highly enough.  As a sexy exploration into a world of fur-filled kinks, it certainly excels, but what kept it in my heart for long after I stopped playing was the narrative happening in between.  The characters are universally delightful (even the ones who start out a bit rough), and the whole experience feels like a good vindaloo or pho; warm and welcoming, with a spicy edge to keep things interesting.  Even the music is delightful, with a bunch of lovingly-crafted chill beats that I actually fell asleep to the first time I listened.  It’s just an all-around great package that I really can’t be effusive enough over.  And I don’t know, maybe your only takeaway from this is, “Hmmm, sounds like Olivia’s a bit of a furry,” and I suppose I can’t stop you from that, particularly if my explanations thus far have done nothing to persuade you.  All I can really say is, if loving Mice Tea makes me a furry, I guess I’ll just have to accept that label.

9.5/10