Margaret de Campos, a store clerk frustrated with her current position in life, finds a tea that turns her into an anthropomorphic mouse. Things only seem to get weirder and more transformative as they go on. Margaret de Campos is a young clerk at a local bookstore who needs some change in her life. Her job feels like a dead end, her love life is in a rut, and she's not happy with how she looks. All of that is upended when she stumbles upon a box of magical tea with the tendency to transform people into anthropomorphic animals. Depending on your choices, the lives of Margaret, her friends, and her coworkers are irrevocably changed as the story leads to several wildly different paths. Help Margaret find love and a deeper understanding of herself and her... proclivities by playing Mice Tea!
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Pretty cute all the way through!
I'd backed this game near the start of it's development in like 2021, I followed updates for a bit, but eventually figured for a visual novel it was better to wait for the full package, and was pleasantly surprised when I got a steam key for it when it came out there! I didn't have the time to actually play through the game fully until now, and it was lots of fun to see the added/finished content!
There's not a crazy amount to critique in terms of game play, it's a visual novel with branching paths, you read and make a couple choices lol. I guess my only "game play" complaint is that the Felicia route is clearly the "intended route" as it has the most content and branches to check out, which can in turn make some of the other routes feel a liiiiitle underbaked. But it's not a deal breaker as each route offers something fun and unique!
The art is good all throughout! It's a little funny when you can tell what was made early in development vs late. But it's also kind of cool to see the different artists skill and style develop between certain gallery scenes.
The writing is really sweet too! I think sometimes it was a little too on the nose or cheesy for me, but I think it all has it's charms. The game never gets too heavy or anything, but all the characters feel thought out, and the little moments of drama are fun! The big twist in the Gavin route is really clever and fun to play out, it's probably the most dramatic the game gets (I guess the Julie route has some of that but it's all played off in a fun way that it doesn't feel quite as dark, just exciting and fun!).
Overall I'm glad I played this game finally! If you're into this kind of stuff, it's got a lot of charm and is worth checking out! I'm also excited to check out what's been done on the sequel!
Oh and to all my friends seeing this! Hi! I try to keep a habi of not just talking about porn or fetishes unless I'm super chill with those people so sorry if this is how you had to find out I'm into this kind of stuff LOL.
I'd backed this game near the start of it's development in like 2021, I followed updates for a bit, but eventually figured for a visual novel it was better to wait for the full package, and was pleasantly surprised when I got a steam key for it when it came out there! I didn't have the time to actually play through the game fully until now, and it was lots of fun to see the added/finished content!
There's not a crazy amount to critique in terms of game play, it's a visual novel with branching paths, you read and make a couple choices lol. I guess my only "game play" complaint is that the Felicia route is clearly the "intended route" as it has the most content and branches to check out, which can in turn make some of the other routes feel a liiiiitle underbaked. But it's not a deal breaker as each route offers something fun and unique!
The art is good all throughout! It's a little funny when you can tell what was made early in development vs late. But it's also kind of cool to see the different artists skill and style develop between certain gallery scenes.
The writing is really sweet too! I think sometimes it was a little too on the nose or cheesy for me, but I think it all has it's charms. The game never gets too heavy or anything, but all the characters feel thought out, and the little moments of drama are fun! The big twist in the Gavin route is really clever and fun to play out, it's probably the most dramatic the game gets (I guess the Julie route has some of that but it's all played off in a fun way that it doesn't feel quite as dark, just exciting and fun!).
Overall I'm glad I played this game finally! If you're into this kind of stuff, it's got a lot of charm and is worth checking out! I'm also excited to check out what's been done on the sequel!
Oh and to all my friends seeing this! Hi! I try to keep a habi of not just talking about porn or fetishes unless I'm super chill with those people so sorry if this is how you had to find out I'm into this kind of stuff LOL.
Easily one of my favorite visual novels I've ever played in my life. I played through it during a particularly rough patch and understanding myself and my life though the characters was... really cathartic.
The game is written impeccably. The themes are all amazing. The characters are amazing, and deeply relatable. Their struggles and their life is one I see reflected in my own, and all in all it was a very, very fun and life-changing experience.
Also, it got me into tea! I recommend a nice warm mug of chai, probably something with fruit like an apple cinnamon, with lots of sugar and some honey. Drink it while enjoying this great visual novel! Maybe something will happen... ;p
The game is written impeccably. The themes are all amazing. The characters are amazing, and deeply relatable. Their struggles and their life is one I see reflected in my own, and all in all it was a very, very fun and life-changing experience.
Also, it got me into tea! I recommend a nice warm mug of chai, probably something with fruit like an apple cinnamon, with lots of sugar and some honey. Drink it while enjoying this great visual novel! Maybe something will happen... ;p
This is a delight to play, and not just in the very horny way that you'd expect with a game like this. Included in the game is a toggle to disable all 18+ content, which I thought was very funny when I first saw it -- but the writing in this VN is just lovely, the characters are cute and charming, and this could easily stand alone without the (really good) explicit content. So much love and care went into making every part of this VN and I sincerely adore it. Margaret is such a relatable character and I want her life so bad. It's the ultimate dream: Become a librarian, get really into tea, gather a cozy circle of close friends, and just settle down for a life of comfort (and lots of reading).
Shoutout to that one meme on twitter that led me to this game and my newfound desire to be an adorable mousegirl :3
Shoutout to that one meme on twitter that led me to this game and my newfound desire to be an adorable mousegirl :3
This game is so adorable and made me squeal (no pun intended) while playing. The amount of active LGBTQIA+ references in here is so enlightening and is such a good source of media to show off all the different people/animals in this world! This game allows for short play throughs (one route) or a full run (all routes) I really recommend this game it is definitely one of my favorite visual novels I’ve played 🥺❤️
Mice Tea’s Felicia route (hereafter referred to as Felicia with italics) is fascinating to me as a work that is explicitly a fandom object about a community that is usually not considered a fandom as much as a literary genre or community of insular artists. The furry community is a fandom, yes, and I think it’s why this lasers into the communal aspects of TGTF (the chosen acronym for gender-bender transformation kink porn, hereafter referred to by said acronym) as well, but it clearly is conversing with the community in ways that Gender Bender DNA Twister Extreme, Student Transfer, and Max’s Big Bust, other notable community efforts, don’t.
Those works, while enjoyable (even if two out of the three are completely impossible to find sexy despite being kink fiction), are very much straightforwardly... fiction with a gender-bender theme. Felicia is about the relationships that people have with gender-bending as a concept, how fiction about it affects them, and using kink as a tool for liberating self-expression. It’s got unobtrusive-but-witheringly-deep cuts to old figures (I am pretty sure that there’s a fucking Sparkling Generation Valkyrie Yuuki reference in one random NPC’s attire) and tempers it with newer approaches.
While Felicia’s explicit sex positivity is extremely cool and worth highlighting and shouting out as a hallmark of more “modern” TGTF, it being a centrally trans narrative instead of a trans-fetishizing narrative is the dead giveaway. The narrative thrust is different, heterosexuality is not compulsory, and it centers on a wlw romance that genuinely focuses on fluffy, cuddly intimacy and not just sex (even if there’s a lot of fucking and most of it has way above-par anatomy and prose for this genre). It’s not deep or even particularly sharp with its character beats, but it’s refreshing, smutty, and enjoyable nonetheless.
This genuine character arc elides my biggest issue with Ms. Transformistress’ pieces outside of this game, which are all coming from a similar intent of genuine trans catharsis, but are hamstrung by their short-form nature. The ethics of this fetish are always murky, but when there’s insufficient setup for establishing the character as “oh they’re actually trans and just don’t know it yet and this non-consensual change is actually exactly what they want” without essentially being a post-hoc retcon it feels tacky. Here, while Felicia is still ultimately that exact plot beat, the drawn-out narrative nature allows it to actually feel earned. The foreshadowing beats, while not exactly subtle, feel real. And despite all this, Felicia succeeds at only feeling preachy when the main character is, in-universe, demonstrating to a male-identifying person how to properly eat pussy. And, like, that’s a public service. The rest of the time, it maintains its fluffy, laid-back, relaxed atmosphere with ease.
The contrast between Felicia’s experiences and Gavin’s allows for genuinely incisive portrayals of dysphoria and euphoria, with Gavin’s hotel metaphor being a genuinely effective way to express emotions impossible for almost anybody to feel. There are portrayals of bigger things that change - people becoming more romantic, sexualities shifting, but equally important are the little beats. One person becomes clumsier and has to exert effort into making themselves present while they want, while the other dances around environments and situations they fumbled through before. The unspoken pressure of dysphoria on their executive function is essentially what causes the entire game to happen.
Gavin is an older-school TGTF protagonist, in a characterization that evokes early-middle Tedd from El Goonish Shive. A tinkerer and researcher, he instigates the transformations and has an interest in the act itself. He considers himself a man no matter what, and even when he has a vagina and breasts he is treated as and written as a man with he/him pronouns. His sex scene in the route is essentially femdom, despite everybody having female bodies, and he then switches bweteen to male and female bodies afterwards. Felicia, by contrast, is is treated as a woman by everybody within the narrative and her gender transformation is early in, more-restrained than Gavin’s, and her body never switches back to its AMAB presentation.
The route has four different side characters who each get a chance to transform, and they each relate differently - one takes to Gavin’s interest in the mechanics and act of transforming, instead being a middle-late Tedd who adopts more genderfluid self-perception (while still smuggling it out of the cities to help trans homies in the sticks), another takes after Felicia and is an explicitly trans blushing mess, one is entirely disinterested in gender presentation and essentially chooses a form out of tool-like interest (notably, this character is a real-life OC that appears in all goddamn sorts of kink stuff I’ve run into, and has few compunctions about scenarios) and one is completely unchanged by the transformation because to her it’s just a way of reinforcing their love of an animal.
These topics aren’t brought up as serious roadblocks to be pondered, they’re touchstones used to establish resonance for the explicitly queer audience it courts. There’s something to the act of transforming and its consequences that grabs somebody and turns them on, and even if it’s just effectively the result of some crossed mental wires, it’s still going to grab each person in different ways. I’ve been a lurker in the TGTF community since before I was in puberty, back when I didn’t have any other frame of reference for how somebody could metamorphose into a form that is, for all intents and purposes, far better for them and way hotter. I infrequently contribute to it, even now, under an array of pen names, alt accounts, and anonymous submissions that are, vaguely, traceable to a central internet personality that refuses to decompartmentalize herself. It’s one of the few places that, even as an unremarkable and forgotten bystander, truly feels like a home to her. This is one of the few works that gets it.
Those works, while enjoyable (even if two out of the three are completely impossible to find sexy despite being kink fiction), are very much straightforwardly... fiction with a gender-bender theme. Felicia is about the relationships that people have with gender-bending as a concept, how fiction about it affects them, and using kink as a tool for liberating self-expression. It’s got unobtrusive-but-witheringly-deep cuts to old figures (I am pretty sure that there’s a fucking Sparkling Generation Valkyrie Yuuki reference in one random NPC’s attire) and tempers it with newer approaches.
While Felicia’s explicit sex positivity is extremely cool and worth highlighting and shouting out as a hallmark of more “modern” TGTF, it being a centrally trans narrative instead of a trans-fetishizing narrative is the dead giveaway. The narrative thrust is different, heterosexuality is not compulsory, and it centers on a wlw romance that genuinely focuses on fluffy, cuddly intimacy and not just sex (even if there’s a lot of fucking and most of it has way above-par anatomy and prose for this genre). It’s not deep or even particularly sharp with its character beats, but it’s refreshing, smutty, and enjoyable nonetheless.
This genuine character arc elides my biggest issue with Ms. Transformistress’ pieces outside of this game, which are all coming from a similar intent of genuine trans catharsis, but are hamstrung by their short-form nature. The ethics of this fetish are always murky, but when there’s insufficient setup for establishing the character as “oh they’re actually trans and just don’t know it yet and this non-consensual change is actually exactly what they want” without essentially being a post-hoc retcon it feels tacky. Here, while Felicia is still ultimately that exact plot beat, the drawn-out narrative nature allows it to actually feel earned. The foreshadowing beats, while not exactly subtle, feel real. And despite all this, Felicia succeeds at only feeling preachy when the main character is, in-universe, demonstrating to a male-identifying person how to properly eat pussy. And, like, that’s a public service. The rest of the time, it maintains its fluffy, laid-back, relaxed atmosphere with ease.
The contrast between Felicia’s experiences and Gavin’s allows for genuinely incisive portrayals of dysphoria and euphoria, with Gavin’s hotel metaphor being a genuinely effective way to express emotions impossible for almost anybody to feel. There are portrayals of bigger things that change - people becoming more romantic, sexualities shifting, but equally important are the little beats. One person becomes clumsier and has to exert effort into making themselves present while they want, while the other dances around environments and situations they fumbled through before. The unspoken pressure of dysphoria on their executive function is essentially what causes the entire game to happen.
Gavin is an older-school TGTF protagonist, in a characterization that evokes early-middle Tedd from El Goonish Shive. A tinkerer and researcher, he instigates the transformations and has an interest in the act itself. He considers himself a man no matter what, and even when he has a vagina and breasts he is treated as and written as a man with he/him pronouns. His sex scene in the route is essentially femdom, despite everybody having female bodies, and he then switches bweteen to male and female bodies afterwards. Felicia, by contrast, is is treated as a woman by everybody within the narrative and her gender transformation is early in, more-restrained than Gavin’s, and her body never switches back to its AMAB presentation.
The route has four different side characters who each get a chance to transform, and they each relate differently - one takes to Gavin’s interest in the mechanics and act of transforming, instead being a middle-late Tedd who adopts more genderfluid self-perception (while still smuggling it out of the cities to help trans homies in the sticks), another takes after Felicia and is an explicitly trans blushing mess, one is entirely disinterested in gender presentation and essentially chooses a form out of tool-like interest (notably, this character is a real-life OC that appears in all goddamn sorts of kink stuff I’ve run into, and has few compunctions about scenarios) and one is completely unchanged by the transformation because to her it’s just a way of reinforcing their love of an animal.
These topics aren’t brought up as serious roadblocks to be pondered, they’re touchstones used to establish resonance for the explicitly queer audience it courts. There’s something to the act of transforming and its consequences that grabs somebody and turns them on, and even if it’s just effectively the result of some crossed mental wires, it’s still going to grab each person in different ways. I’ve been a lurker in the TGTF community since before I was in puberty, back when I didn’t have any other frame of reference for how somebody could metamorphose into a form that is, for all intents and purposes, far better for them and way hotter. I infrequently contribute to it, even now, under an array of pen names, alt accounts, and anonymous submissions that are, vaguely, traceable to a central internet personality that refuses to decompartmentalize herself. It’s one of the few places that, even as an unremarkable and forgotten bystander, truly feels like a home to her. This is one of the few works that gets it.