Visual Novel / Mice Tea

Margaret drinking the titular beverage

Mice Tea is a transformation-focused Visual Novel created by Cinnamon Switch. After a development period in which only Patreon supporters had access to Early Access builds, a public version was available to purchase through itch.io in early February 2023, with a free demo made available on April 12th, 2023, and a complete version and Steam release on April 28, 2023. Although the work itself is intended for mature audiences, there is Adjustable Censorship, and the developers also have a safe-for-work Tumblr blog starring its main cast located here.

Margaret de Campos is a bookstore employee who's unsatisfied with her current life, until she comes across a strange box of tea flavors and learns that it has the power to magically transform people into anthropomorphic animals. Together, she and her close friends/coworkers discover whole new sides to themselves, and gain deeper understandings of themselves along the way.

A sequel, Coffee Buns, is currently in development with a free WIP demo available for download on itch.io.

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Tropes:

• Adjustable Censorship: Starting with version 0.11.0, in addition to the option to display content warnings before certain scenes and the option to skip sex scenes, there was an added option to replace all nude character sprites with ones in which characters are instead wearing a gym outfit with "SFW" (Safe For Work) emblazoned on their shirt.
• All There in the Manual: The Cinnamon Switch Patreon and Tumblr accounts includes some Q&A comics in which the cast answer questions about themselves, such as why Julie became an artist or if they've ever been tempted to go completely feral.
• Animal Motifs: Even on top of the naming scheme. Margaret is mousy. Sylvia sometimes wears fishnets that cover her legs in a geometric pattern. Julie is a thief.
• Animorphism: The main appeal of this story is people transforming into anthropomorphic animals. Some of the notable transformations are Margaret becoming a mouse girl, Sylvia becoming a snake girl, Felicia becoming a Cat Girl, Gavin becoming a hawk man, and Julie becoming a raccoon girl.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • If fast-forwarding through a route you've played before to get the choices you didn't pick last time, the fast-forward will stop automatically when it gets to any new text resulting from your new choices, so the player doesn't miss a thing.
  • A map of all the Story Branching in the game is accessible from the very start in the Extra menu, and can be used to easily locate specific content, though opening it before getting any endings brings up a warning that using it might spoil part of the experience.
• April Fools' Day:
  • On April 1, 2023, instead of releasing the 1.0 version of Mice Tea (as only the month of release was known at the time), the team instead released Moth Tea, starring L the Moth Girl from urban fantasy web novel Chrysalis. When Mice Tea officially released on Steam, Moth Tea was included as an Extra feature.
  • For April 1, 2024, the team released Mice Tea: Oops! All Gyarus!, in which the cast celebrates their anniversary by transforming into Gyaru Girls. Notably, it is also the first time "Maggie" and "Portia" interact, having been exclusive to respectively Sylvia and Julie's routes.
• Cast Full of Gay: Out of the five-person main cast, only one of them considers himself heterosexual. It's even used as a selling point on the store pages: "This VN is super queer. There's also a straight guy. He's really nice!"
• Cat Girl: What ends up becoming Felicia's default form on her route. She takes to her animal characteristics far quicker than Margaret does with her own initially, and even after Margaret grows fonder of them during the story she still doesn't wear them casually, unlike Felicia who is seen in them more often than not. While Felicia's reasons for doing so are left ambiguous, it's alluded to that it probably has to do with finally being able to properly communicate with her cats.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Typical for dating sims, each character has a main color for their respective wardrobes. Margaret is red, Gavin is green, Felicia is blue, Sylvia is yellow, and Julie is purple. Margaret's headmate Peggy, who only appears in Sylvia's route, is orange, and their potential Split-Personality Merge Maggie is reddish-orange. "Portia", Felicia's amnesia-induced alter ego in Julie's route, is pink.
• Downer Ending: Given how there are multiple endings, there are bout to be some endings that ends poorly for both parities. Some notable examples includes:
  • After walking out on Sylvia following her outburst, Margaret has to contend with her alter-ego who tries to persuades her into a life of luxury and would go massive online shopping spreads of dresses, stockings and jewelry, as well as living by herself for nearly a month because of it. Meanwhile, Sylvia has since quit her job at the bookstore, leaving Felix to run the store by himself until Margaret gets back from her vacation with no one truly knowing what happened to Sylvia afterwards.
• Easy Amnesia: Happens to Felicia in Julie's route, due to the branching story paths. Since Margaret wasn't present to steady her when she transformed for the first time, Felicia wound up hitting her head and forgetting who she was. She winds up going by the name "Portia", and being taken in by Sylvia. The amnesia is ultimately fixed when she narrowly dodges being hit by Julie's falling duffel bag at Ricky's gala, and the ensuing adrenaline rush, coupled with Sylvia's offhanded comment about her having "cat-like reflexes",^*Felicia owns eight cats and hasn't tended to them for nearly a week at this point due to the amnesia winds up bringing her memories back.
• The Fashionista: Sylvia considers looking fabulous an utmost priority, whether she's in a human or animal form. In one Q&A comic, she mentions needing to tailor outfits to fit her larger-hipped snake transformation and doesn't wear them in her human form because they'd appear too frumpy. Maggie adds that Sylvia sometimes just wears sweats to her office so it's easier to swap outfits, and Sylvia starts panicking and swearing that Maggie was just lying.
• Gender Bender:
  • Drinking the tea caused Felicia's body to change from male to female, even after the animalistic effects of the tea have worn off.
  • One of the Q&A comics has Gavin and Margaret talk about the former experimenting with teas in order to be both a "big strong bull boyfriend" and a "cuddly little cow" in a single night.
• Hypnotic Eyes: Sylvia's main transformation is into a Snake Person, which transforms her legs into a tail and gives her yellow snake eyes that can hypnotize a person.
• Incredible Shrinking Man: Margaret's initial imbibing of the titular tea not only gives her the body of an anthropomorphic mouse, but also shrinks her to the size of a regular mouse. This becomes the focus of Gavin's route, with the two experimenting with power dynamics and how (literally) wild they're willing to go with their transformations.
• Kindhearted Cat Lover: Felicia, natch. She not only owns eight cats ^*also all but outright admitting she's doing so in defiance of her landlord and constantly refers to them as her "babies", she even personally cooks them their own food no fewer than twice daily out of chicken breasts, rice, and mixed vegetables, condemning the comparably substandard quality of commercially available cat food while proudly stating, "My sweeties only get the best!"
• Late-Arrival Spoiler: Some of the Q&A comics made public during development show characters in forms that will not make sense without having played the game-in-progress, such as a post-transition Felicia or Maggie.
• Leitmotif: Every important character has at least one.
  • Margaret has "Theme of a Mousey Girl" for day-to-day life, and "Sleepytime" for more peaceful moments. Peggy, a second personality induced by Sylvia's Hypnotic Eyes in one route, has "The Hips Know, Sis".
  • Sylvia has "Dangerous Curls" for her regular appearance, and "More Like You" for "Honey Peach Sylvia".
  • Gavin has "Notes of Sweetness", with a Low Key variant.
  • There are three versions for Felicia's theme "Peaceful Heart": a Slacks Version when she's still Felix, a Skirt Version after her change in gender, and a Low Key variant.
  • Julie has "Little Tea Leaf", with a Low Key variant, as well as a song for when she's causing mischief, "Oh My God Julie, This Is the Last Time I Let You Talk Me Into This, For Real, I Mean It".
• Love Interests: The story's four main branches each focus on someone that Margaret could be romantically involved with: Gavin, Felicia, Sylvia, and Julie.
• Magic Potion: All of the transformations in this work are the result of imbibing in different flavors of magical tea.
• Mathematician's Answer: One of the Q&A comics has someone ask what would happen if a person became pregnant while under the effect of Kemono Tea, and Margaret goes into a lengthy explanation complete with scientific diagrams on the human maternity cycle. At the end, Felicia notes that what the asker probably meant is whether or not the child would have animal features as a side effect of the tea, but Margaret doesn't know and is too busy with her business to find out.
• Meaningful Name: Several of the leads have varying degrees of clues in their names to what they change into. Several are tied to their ethnicity as well.
  • Felix and Felicia both use the Latin prefix for "cat".
  • Sylvia's last name, Drake, is a mythical reptile, not unlike the naga she turns into.
  • Gavin's last name, Van der Valk, is Dutch for "of the falcon".
  • Margaret's last name, de Campos, is Portuguese for "of fields", where mice are common.
  • Julie's last name, Lin (林) is Chinese for "forest". Like fields and mice, raccoons are common there.
• Multiple Endings: The story has four main routes, one for each of Margaret's Love Interests, and each of which has different conclusions dependent on the characters' transformations and the state of their relationship.
• Mundane Utility: One route has Margaret deciding to use the Kemono Tea, which lets people undergo complete body transformations, talk to animals, and a myriad of other magical effects, to simply rebrand their ordinary café into a Cosplay Café.
• Partial Transformation: The amount of Kemono Tea that a person drinks can affect how far they transform, from merely having some animal features to being covered in fur/scales/feathers to a complete transformation.
• Second Law of Gender-Bending: Felicia identifies as male named Felix at the start of the story, but after the tea's side effects change her body to that of a woman, she realizes she's transgender and starts identifying as a girl. Subverted and zig-zagged with Gavin, who transforms into a woman during Felicia's story, transforms back, and then (once the tea transformations prove reversible) transforms back and forth a few more times when the mood strikes him instead of staying a woman.
• Shapeshifting Excludes Clothing:
  • When Margaret becomes an Incredible Shrinking Man (or rather, mouse), her clothing remains human-sized, requiring Gavin to reveal his hobby of sewing doll clothing and come to her aid.
  • One of the Q&A comics has Sylvia go into detail about needing a tailor to craft wide-hipped skirts specifically for her Snake People transformation. This is likely due to the fact that her initial transformation in her route has her enormous snake tail literally bursting out of her tights.
• Shout-Out: Several to Changeling Tale, another adult transformation-themed visual novel that the creators of whom are on friendly terms with Cinnamon Switch. Most notable is Malcolm's green tartan flatcap that Margaret wears to hide her mouse ears, as well as turning into a highland cow when she drinks the tea with milk.
• Showing Off the New Body: After Margaret is transformed into a mouse-sized anthropomorphic mouse, one of the first things she does is use her mobile phone's reflection to examine the full extent of what happened to her. Some later, more willing transformations have her check herself out in the mirror for purely self-indulgent reasons.
• Sneeze Cut: In the "Going Feral" Q&A, animated here, Julie asks who could possibly want to fully transform into an animal. It immediately cuts to Gavin sneezing.
• Speaks Fluent Animal: One of the side effects of drinking Kemono Tea is the ability to understand the animal transformed into, as cat-owner Felicia learns upon turning into a Cat Girl herself.
• Split-Personality Merge: In the normal path for Sylvia, Margaret merges with the Peggy personality Sylvia accidentally created after a confrontation with Julie. It takes her a moment to realize there's only one voice in her head and that she can remember the experiences both she and Peggy had as though she had them. This is reflected in her name box changing to a reddish-orange, halfway between Margaret's red and Peggy's orange. After some soul-searching she decides to call her new merged self Maggie.
• Unmanly Secret: The Q&A comic asking what everyone's favorite animated movie is has Gavin state that his is Porco Rosso with narration text stating that it's actually The Cat Returns. When Felicia tries to state that her own favorite movie is The Cat Returns but struggles to remember the title, Gavin helps her, and then acts flustered when Felicia asks how he knew that was the movie she was describing.
• You Sexy Beast: There are numerous scenes of intimacy between the characters in their transformed states, more so than in their original human forms.

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