Forage & Brew

A cat witch, a grandmother's workshop, and a save system that simply isn't there. Forage & Brew is a free-to-play game from developer Forage & Brew and publisher Rubika Supinfogame, released 31 March 2026. This review draws on a large 231-review sample, rated Mixed, with 89 English-language reviews read in depth, including the most detailed accounts on both sides of the split.

A genuinely charming premise, confirmed directly

This review checked the store's own detailed description and confirmed a premise this review's sample consistently found appealing: playing as a small cat witch who inherits her late grandmother's potion workshop, foraging ingredients that shift with the daily weather and lunar cycle, and brewing potions from a hand-me-down grimoire to fulfill requests from clients around the forest. It's a cozy, low-stakes hook, and this review's sample repeatedly engaged with it warmly even when the surrounding experience frustrated them.

Nearly unanimous praise for tone, undercut by one severe absence

This review's sample repeatedly praised the game's art style, music, and overall atmosphere, with reviewers independently calling it "adorable," "really cool and relaxing," and full of potential even among those who ultimately could not recommend it. But that goodwill runs directly into a single, severe problem this review's sample raised with striking consistency: Forage & Brew has no save system of any kind. Reviewers across the sample called this "a huge disappointment," "an absolute game crime," and "an instant thumbs down," independently and without prompting. For a game explicitly built around a slow, day-by-day cozy loop, losing all progress on every exit is not a minor omission, and this review treats it as the single most important fact about the current state of the game.

Bugs beyond the missing save, independently confirmed

This review's sample documented a consistent set of progression-blocking bugs well beyond the save issue. Multiple reviewers independently described a recipe book that becomes permanently stuck, unable to turn pages or close, one reviewer specifically noted having to exit the game entirely to escape it. Others described potions vanishing from delivery containers after a trip into the forest, and chopping-block interactions that simply stop responding to input, halting recipe progress outright. The consistency of these specific, separately reported bugs across unconnected reviewers gives this review confidence they reflect real, reproducible problems rather than isolated incidents.

Silence from the developer, confirmed independently

One reviewer put it bluntly: "COMPLETE radio silence from the Developer(s)" despite the game being live for over a month with widely reported, game-breaking bugs. This review checked the developer's partner-events feed directly and found zero posts of any kind, no launch announcement, no patch notes, no acknowledgment of the issues this review's sample describes so consistently. That absence directly corroborates the reviewer's specific complaint rather than leaving it as an unverified impression, and it's a meaningfully worse signal than titles this review has covered with thin-but-present post-launch activity.

An accessibility picture that matches a specific reviewer complaint

This review checked the store's accessibility feature-flag block directly and found zero of nineteen tracked flags true, the lowest possible showing this review has recorded across its coverage this cycle. One reviewer's detailed account independently described the game as effectively unplayable without a controller, reporting no functional keyboard or mouse control scheme at all, a claim this review cannot fully verify firsthand but which lines up precisely with the store's own flags showing no keyboard-only or mouse-only option present.

A tag that overstates what's actually available

This review checked the store's own tag list against the detailed description and this review's sample, and found "Character Customization" to be a stretch: one detailed reviewer specifically noted hoping for character customization at creation and instead finding themselves "stuck with the base model on load," with only unlockable clothing sets available during play rather than any creation-time customization.

Weighing a free price against a genuinely broken current state

Forage & Brew costs nothing to try, and several reviewers in this review's sample explicitly factored that into their tolerance, multiple specifically wrote they would gladly pay for a finished, fixed version of the game. This review takes that goodwill seriously, a free price genuinely lowers the bar. But a missing save system paired with a fully silent developer a month past launch is a severe combination regardless of price, and this review does not believe "it's free" is sufficient reason to recommend spending time on a game that currently cannot reliably be progressed through or returned to.

How this compares to a crowded cozy-sim field

Cat-themed cozy sims and potion-brewing games are both individually well-trodden ground on Steam, and Forage & Brew's combination of the two is a reasonably distinctive angle within that crowded space, this review's sample consistently engaged with the foraging-and-brewing loop as the game's real hook rather than treating it as interchangeable with other cozy titles. But a crowded genre also means competing releases with working save systems and active support are readily available to the same audience, and this review notes that Forage & Brew's current state puts it at a real disadvantage against alternatives that deliver the basics this review's sample found missing here.

What would change this review's verdict

This review wants to be specific about what would move this recommendation from a pass to something more positive: a functioning save system is the single non-negotiable fix this review's sample calls for almost unanimously, alongside patches for the specific, repeatable bugs described above, the stuck recipe book, the vanishing delivery-bin contents, and the unresponsive chopping block. Multiple reviewers in this review's sample said plainly they would return, and even pay, once those fixes land. This review would revisit its assessment readily if the developer's partner-events feed showed that kind of activity in the future.

Verdict

Forage & Brew pairs a genuinely charming cat-witch premise with a near-total absence of the basics that make a cozy sim playable across multiple sessions: no save system, a cluster of independently confirmed progression-blocking bugs, and a developer whose partner-events feed shows zero activity of any kind since launch. This review recommends waiting, not buying, even at a price of nothing, until there's real evidence the developer is addressing what this review's large sample has already documented in detail.