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Game Review: Coffee Talk
I don't usually play visual novels--if you look back through the visual novel tag, you'll find only two other examples of games. It's not because I don't like them conceptually or anything, since I've had the install discs for Ever 17 sitting on my hard drive through four computers and I keep telling myself that someday, someday, I'll get it to. And someday, I will! I got to this one first, though, for three reasons. The first is that ![[instagram.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/profile_icons/instagram.png)
sashagee told me about it and said it was probably the kind of game I would like, I think because the sequel was advertised to her on Playstation when she was browsing through sale games. The second is that the background is full of fantasy races, with a line about how the "elves have left the forest to build their startups" right in the intro, though that ended up grating on me in the end for reasons I'll get into. The third is that the playtime on HLTB was around five hours and I was running out of time in the month. Even though I intended to play it two weekends ago, and didn't, and then I intended to play it last weekend, and didn't...
Well, I started it on Tuesday and finished it on Friday after about five hours or so. At least an hour of that involved Laila sitting on my lap, wanting to see the game with the "chairs" or the "blue dresses." That makes me feel like I'll probably be playing more visual novels in the future.
… Sometimes you want to go
Where everybody knows your name.
Coffee Talk is the name of the game and the name of the place in the game, a coffee shop that opens only after sundown and closes when the owner feels like it. It charges the same price for every drink and often seems to give drinks on the house, but somehow always has enough money to keep going. It's open seven nights a week and has a small group of regular clients who come to know each other.
It seems to me like the designers were trying to have all the good parts of a coffee shop and a bar together. Like a bar, Coffee Talk is open late, it's mostly counter seating so the person behind the bar frequently interacts with the patrons, and it has a wide variety of custom drinks with names like "Gala Had", "Cough Syrup", and "Marrakech." Like a coffee shop, it doesn't serve any alcoholic drinks, it has a calm atmosphere with chill lo-fi anime hip-hop beats you can study and/or relax to, and people come there to do work. That's really the main story of Coffee Talk, with Freya Fatima (the woman on the right) being a short story writer who also works as a journalist who is also trying to write a novel. Exactly the sort of patron who would hang out at a late-night coffee shop that frequently gives away free drinks.
On the scale of visual novel interactivity, Coffee Talk rates pretty low. There's no choices to make that will lead to your death (Shoutout to Fate/Stay Night, I was terrible at that game), and indeed, no dialogue choices at all. The only choice is what drink to give customers when they make their order--sometimes they'll give you an exact drink, and sometimes they'll give you a suggestion, but you can serve them anything you want. This changes the dialogue in generally minor ways, but at least a couple times it can have story effects. And you read that chatter between patrons and learn their life stories, and you occasionally respond with a bit of wisdom, and as their circumstances change from day to day, you hear their joys and their sorrows.
And through it all you make a lot of drinks.
Delicious matcha.
Drink-making is the only real interactive mechanic in Coffee Talk. A customer will order a drink, sometimes by name and sometimes by saying "I want tea with honey" or "I want something warm and sweet" and it's up to you to fulfill their request. This is mostly just for color, because there's no health meter or "you can only screw up once before all your customers leave" mechanic or anything. This isn't a coffee shop capitalism simulator, it's a story of the lives of your customers, so if you give them the wrong drink, they'll just grimace and say something like "I didn't order this" and you apologize and the dialogue continues on as it would regardless.
This is part of what I meant about how Coffee Talk (the location) has the good parts of a bar, though askingsashagee, she says that people come to coffee shops all the time with no idea what's on the menu or what they want and then ask a million questions about every possible ingredient in the drinks, so maybe I'm mistaken. 
There's a limited number of special drinks with names, from classics like cappuccino or hot chocolate to lesser-known-in-America ones like the STMJ (from the Indonesian Susu [Milk], Telur [Egg], Madu [Honey], and Jahe [Ginger]) or Shai Adeni to drinks made up for the game with names like "Cough Syrup" and "Milky Way," and then a lot of general drinks like "Honey milk tea" whose names are dynamically derived from the ingredients. Generally, the unique named drinks are always the ones you want to make and the generic ones are there because there's no reason you shouldn't be able to make honey milk tea, but if a customer asks for something sweet will milk, then honey milk tea will satisfy them even if a Milky Way would unlock a few extra dialogue options. This is a visual novel, though, so if you serve a customer the wrong drink you can replay that specific day, fast-forward through all the dialogue you've already read, and then try again after only maybe 20-30 seconds of playtime.
This mostly comes into play in Endless mode, which true to its name is an endless parade of customers ordering drinks, sometimes by name, sometimes by taste and you have a minute and a half to make as many drinks as you can. Each successful drink adds to the clock, with a larger amount the closer you are to the timer running out, and each failed drink doesn't help you at all. It's primarily a game of memorization, since time taken to look up all the drinks is time that you're not making them--and the animation for drink-making plays every time and does not stop the timer, so even on a successful drink you make instantly, that +16 seconds is more like +5 seconds total--but it's also about figuring out what it means when a customer asks for something that's "bitter but not warm." I did it briefly to try it out and got around 30 correct drinks (and 10 failed drinks) before running out of time, so it's not exactly Dark Souls either. Buy the game for the story, not for the gameplay. It's a visual novel.
Elves, man.
I mentioned Freya Fatima above, and she's effectively the main character, since the barista--who I named "Guy" because I figured I was playing someone generic--mostly just listens and only very occasionally offers a bit of advice. Freya is always there, listening to the other customers for inspiration for her book and occasionally interacting, but mostly trying to get some work done. It's the other people who have problems they're trying to resolve.
And that's my main problem with the game. It commits the cardinal sin of metaphors--trying to use fantasy species as a stand-in for real-world racism or oppression. Take the screenshot above. Baileys (odd name, but it's his) is an elf, and mentions the attitude of elves in the world of Coffee Talk. They're all old money racist jerks, immortal and never suffering from disease. Elves expect their children to go into prestigious fields like law or medicine or politics, something with a lot of social status attached, and Baileys's parents made no secret of their displeasure that he decided to major in art. As he puts it, the standard elven attitude is that anyone who wants to study art had better be the next Da Vinci, otherwise they're just wasting their time. Baileys is dating a succubus named Lua. We don't learn anything about succubi in terms of their place in society, but we do learn that Baileys's parents hate the idea of him associating with one and that if their relationship became public, they might disown him. This would apparently strip him of his immortality and excellent health, hence the conversation that leads to the above statement. This is played as a standard familial conflict, with Baileys willing to abandon his family for love, Lua much closer to her family and not willing to break all ties with them, Lua worried that Baileys will come to resent her for losing his social status (here embodied as his immortality and immunity to disease), all perfectly reasonable concerns that need to be solved for a relationship to endure.
But unlike in the real world, these are fantasy species. The differences between human ethnic groups mostly come down to coloration and propensity for disease, with the very occasional "Tibetans are genetically better at dealing with altitude sickness" level of difference. In the world of Coffee Talk, there are vampires who are immortal and need to drink blood (though there are artificial blood substitutes available), werewolves and nekomimi (猫耳, literally "cat ears") who can physically transform into animals, and elves who are immune to sickness or age. When I saw that an elf was in a relationship with a succubus, I assumed that Baileys's parents would think she enthralled him with her succubus wiles and that's part of why they'd be so against the relationship. But not only did that not apparently happen, the possibility of it happening is never even addressed! And there are werewolves who can turn into rampaging wolfmen, so it's not like overtly supernatural abilities are off the table. Why even include a succubus if you're not going to mention the thing that succubi are most famous for?
And I didn't even think of it at the time, but Gala the werewolf, visible at right on the screenshot above, is a veteran. He fought in a war, probably 'Nam but maybe the Korean War, and has PTSD. He's also a werewolf and once a month he flips out and turns into a rampaging monster that has a serious chance of causing property damage or injury, since if you successfully calm him down when this happens and he talks to you later, he mentions checking his clothes for blood. This is a pretty callous way to metaphorically relate to war veterans, whose trauma does not inevitably turn them into rampaging monsters.
Ah, existentialism.
This bothers me so much partially because it's a long-standing issue with fantastic fiction, going back to things like the X-men trying to portray the Mutant Registration Act as some kind of fascist overreaction when movies like Logan show that the Mutant Registration Act is absolutely necessary to protect the public, but also because it's so easy to not only dilute the intended message but invert. Like with D&D half-elves, where the prejudice is usually treated as equivalent to real-world racial bigotry but from the elven perspective, having a child with a human is basically deliberately inflicting that child with a terminal illness that will kill them at 25 (relative to the elven lifespan). I was not rooting for Baileys and Lua to get together, I was really hoping that they would determine that their differences were too great and they would break up, because realistically speaking, their differences are much greater than the game portrays them as.
That said, the other characters' storylines were much more to my taste and, especially if The Racism Metaphor doesn't bother you as much as it does me, you should absolutely play this game for those. There's Freya's quest to become an author, of course, but there's also the conflict between Rachel Florencia, a nekomimi pop star apparently based on an actual Indonesian actress, and her father, who was an old hand in the music industry and knows about its seedy dark side. There's Gala the werewolf and Hyde the vampire, who have known each other for sixty years. There's Myrtle the orc and Aqua the mermaid, who both work in game development. There's Jorji the cop, whose beat includes Coffee Talk's location. And there's Neil, the traveler. None of them have "routes" or anything like from a dating sim, but you do learn more about their lives. And if you make them the proper drinks, you can increase your connection with them on "Tomodachill," the obvious don't-sue-us Facebook. I didn't realize it until a couple in-game days in, but as events in-game happen, people update their profiles and change their profile photos. Rachel, as you might expect, changes her profile photo like six times. Kids. I'm sure if I was a teenager playing this I would side with Rachel, but as a middle-aged dad, I'm sorry, if you have to say "I'm an adult!" in every single conversation to justify your decisions you are definitely not an adult.
My favorite character is probably Hyde the vampire, at least partially because he's not a metaphor for a real-world injustice but also because he articulated my viewpoint in the Baileys/Lua situation. Baileys talks about love, about how he's willing to leave his family and who cares about family anyway and Hyde is like "Lua does, did you ever think of that?" Some other patrons say Hyde is a jerk but the truth is that love is not all you need and you're heading for disaster if you think it is.
Plus Hyde and Gala's interactions as very old friends were really heartwarming.
This is Seattle, it's more like every corner.
Heartwarming, like a nice cup of coffee. That's my main description of Coffee Talk. It's a chill, low-stress game, with chill low-stress music to go along with people's stories of mostly solvable problems. Despite The Racism Metaphor, most problems in the game aren't really that heavy. Myrtle's problem is working too much overtime, for example, and Freya is really stressed about her novel, she has a coffee shop she can always go to when she wants to write with a nice cup of espresso in front of her. If only we all had a place to go where everyone knew our name, and they were always glad we came.
Like I mentioned above,sashagee told me about this game, and the reason she knew about it is that she was advertised the sequel: Coffee Talk Episode 2: Hibiscus & Butterfly. I've looked a bit into and read this Rock Paper Shotgun review, which makes me anticipate it a bit and sigh a bit too, but the comment on that review mentions VA-11 HALL-A, another game I've wanted to play for a while. That game you run a bar so the drinks are much more important, but you still get to hear their stories. I checked it out on Steam and the very top review mentions Coffee Talk, so I'm thinking I'll be back both to fantasy Seattle and to the cyberpunk future, where oppression is definitely not a metaphor.
sashagee told me about it and said it was probably the kind of game I would like, I think because the sequel was advertised to her on Playstation when she was browsing through sale games. The second is that the background is full of fantasy races, with a line about how the "elves have left the forest to build their startups" right in the intro, though that ended up grating on me in the end for reasons I'll get into. The third is that the playtime on HLTB was around five hours and I was running out of time in the month. Even though I intended to play it two weekends ago, and didn't, and then I intended to play it last weekend, and didn't...Well, I started it on Tuesday and finished it on Friday after about five hours or so. At least an hour of that involved Laila sitting on my lap, wanting to see the game with the "chairs" or the "blue dresses." That makes me feel like I'll probably be playing more visual novels in the future.
… Sometimes you want to go
Where everybody knows your name.
Coffee Talk is the name of the game and the name of the place in the game, a coffee shop that opens only after sundown and closes when the owner feels like it. It charges the same price for every drink and often seems to give drinks on the house, but somehow always has enough money to keep going. It's open seven nights a week and has a small group of regular clients who come to know each other.
It seems to me like the designers were trying to have all the good parts of a coffee shop and a bar together. Like a bar, Coffee Talk is open late, it's mostly counter seating so the person behind the bar frequently interacts with the patrons, and it has a wide variety of custom drinks with names like "Gala Had", "Cough Syrup", and "Marrakech." Like a coffee shop, it doesn't serve any alcoholic drinks, it has a calm atmosphere with chill lo-fi anime hip-hop beats you can study and/or relax to, and people come there to do work. That's really the main story of Coffee Talk, with Freya Fatima (the woman on the right) being a short story writer who also works as a journalist who is also trying to write a novel. Exactly the sort of patron who would hang out at a late-night coffee shop that frequently gives away free drinks.
On the scale of visual novel interactivity, Coffee Talk rates pretty low. There's no choices to make that will lead to your death (Shoutout to Fate/Stay Night, I was terrible at that game), and indeed, no dialogue choices at all. The only choice is what drink to give customers when they make their order--sometimes they'll give you an exact drink, and sometimes they'll give you a suggestion, but you can serve them anything you want. This changes the dialogue in generally minor ways, but at least a couple times it can have story effects. And you read that chatter between patrons and learn their life stories, and you occasionally respond with a bit of wisdom, and as their circumstances change from day to day, you hear their joys and their sorrows.
And through it all you make a lot of drinks.
Delicious matcha.
Drink-making is the only real interactive mechanic in Coffee Talk. A customer will order a drink, sometimes by name and sometimes by saying "I want tea with honey" or "I want something warm and sweet" and it's up to you to fulfill their request. This is mostly just for color, because there's no health meter or "you can only screw up once before all your customers leave" mechanic or anything. This isn't a coffee shop capitalism simulator, it's a story of the lives of your customers, so if you give them the wrong drink, they'll just grimace and say something like "I didn't order this" and you apologize and the dialogue continues on as it would regardless.
This is part of what I meant about how Coffee Talk (the location) has the good parts of a bar, though asking
sashagee, she says that people come to coffee shops all the time with no idea what's on the menu or what they want and then ask a million questions about every possible ingredient in the drinks, so maybe I'm mistaken. There's a limited number of special drinks with names, from classics like cappuccino or hot chocolate to lesser-known-in-America ones like the STMJ (from the Indonesian Susu [Milk], Telur [Egg], Madu [Honey], and Jahe [Ginger]) or Shai Adeni to drinks made up for the game with names like "Cough Syrup" and "Milky Way," and then a lot of general drinks like "Honey milk tea" whose names are dynamically derived from the ingredients. Generally, the unique named drinks are always the ones you want to make and the generic ones are there because there's no reason you shouldn't be able to make honey milk tea, but if a customer asks for something sweet will milk, then honey milk tea will satisfy them even if a Milky Way would unlock a few extra dialogue options. This is a visual novel, though, so if you serve a customer the wrong drink you can replay that specific day, fast-forward through all the dialogue you've already read, and then try again after only maybe 20-30 seconds of playtime.
This mostly comes into play in Endless mode, which true to its name is an endless parade of customers ordering drinks, sometimes by name, sometimes by taste and you have a minute and a half to make as many drinks as you can. Each successful drink adds to the clock, with a larger amount the closer you are to the timer running out, and each failed drink doesn't help you at all. It's primarily a game of memorization, since time taken to look up all the drinks is time that you're not making them--and the animation for drink-making plays every time and does not stop the timer, so even on a successful drink you make instantly, that +16 seconds is more like +5 seconds total--but it's also about figuring out what it means when a customer asks for something that's "bitter but not warm." I did it briefly to try it out and got around 30 correct drinks (and 10 failed drinks) before running out of time, so it's not exactly Dark Souls either. Buy the game for the story, not for the gameplay. It's a visual novel.
Elves, man.
I mentioned Freya Fatima above, and she's effectively the main character, since the barista--who I named "Guy" because I figured I was playing someone generic--mostly just listens and only very occasionally offers a bit of advice. Freya is always there, listening to the other customers for inspiration for her book and occasionally interacting, but mostly trying to get some work done. It's the other people who have problems they're trying to resolve.
And that's my main problem with the game. It commits the cardinal sin of metaphors--trying to use fantasy species as a stand-in for real-world racism or oppression. Take the screenshot above. Baileys (odd name, but it's his) is an elf, and mentions the attitude of elves in the world of Coffee Talk. They're all old money racist jerks, immortal and never suffering from disease. Elves expect their children to go into prestigious fields like law or medicine or politics, something with a lot of social status attached, and Baileys's parents made no secret of their displeasure that he decided to major in art. As he puts it, the standard elven attitude is that anyone who wants to study art had better be the next Da Vinci, otherwise they're just wasting their time. Baileys is dating a succubus named Lua. We don't learn anything about succubi in terms of their place in society, but we do learn that Baileys's parents hate the idea of him associating with one and that if their relationship became public, they might disown him. This would apparently strip him of his immortality and excellent health, hence the conversation that leads to the above statement. This is played as a standard familial conflict, with Baileys willing to abandon his family for love, Lua much closer to her family and not willing to break all ties with them, Lua worried that Baileys will come to resent her for losing his social status (here embodied as his immortality and immunity to disease), all perfectly reasonable concerns that need to be solved for a relationship to endure.
But unlike in the real world, these are fantasy species. The differences between human ethnic groups mostly come down to coloration and propensity for disease, with the very occasional "Tibetans are genetically better at dealing with altitude sickness" level of difference. In the world of Coffee Talk, there are vampires who are immortal and need to drink blood (though there are artificial blood substitutes available), werewolves and nekomimi (猫耳, literally "cat ears") who can physically transform into animals, and elves who are immune to sickness or age. When I saw that an elf was in a relationship with a succubus, I assumed that Baileys's parents would think she enthralled him with her succubus wiles and that's part of why they'd be so against the relationship. But not only did that not apparently happen, the possibility of it happening is never even addressed! And there are werewolves who can turn into rampaging wolfmen, so it's not like overtly supernatural abilities are off the table. Why even include a succubus if you're not going to mention the thing that succubi are most famous for?
And I didn't even think of it at the time, but Gala the werewolf, visible at right on the screenshot above, is a veteran. He fought in a war, probably 'Nam but maybe the Korean War, and has PTSD. He's also a werewolf and once a month he flips out and turns into a rampaging monster that has a serious chance of causing property damage or injury, since if you successfully calm him down when this happens and he talks to you later, he mentions checking his clothes for blood. This is a pretty callous way to metaphorically relate to war veterans, whose trauma does not inevitably turn them into rampaging monsters.
Ah, existentialism.
This bothers me so much partially because it's a long-standing issue with fantastic fiction, going back to things like the X-men trying to portray the Mutant Registration Act as some kind of fascist overreaction when movies like Logan show that the Mutant Registration Act is absolutely necessary to protect the public, but also because it's so easy to not only dilute the intended message but invert. Like with D&D half-elves, where the prejudice is usually treated as equivalent to real-world racial bigotry but from the elven perspective, having a child with a human is basically deliberately inflicting that child with a terminal illness that will kill them at 25 (relative to the elven lifespan). I was not rooting for Baileys and Lua to get together, I was really hoping that they would determine that their differences were too great and they would break up, because realistically speaking, their differences are much greater than the game portrays them as.
That said, the other characters' storylines were much more to my taste and, especially if The Racism Metaphor doesn't bother you as much as it does me, you should absolutely play this game for those. There's Freya's quest to become an author, of course, but there's also the conflict between Rachel Florencia, a nekomimi pop star apparently based on an actual Indonesian actress, and her father, who was an old hand in the music industry and knows about its seedy dark side. There's Gala the werewolf and Hyde the vampire, who have known each other for sixty years. There's Myrtle the orc and Aqua the mermaid, who both work in game development. There's Jorji the cop, whose beat includes Coffee Talk's location. And there's Neil, the traveler. None of them have "routes" or anything like from a dating sim, but you do learn more about their lives. And if you make them the proper drinks, you can increase your connection with them on "Tomodachill," the obvious don't-sue-us Facebook. I didn't realize it until a couple in-game days in, but as events in-game happen, people update their profiles and change their profile photos. Rachel, as you might expect, changes her profile photo like six times. Kids. I'm sure if I was a teenager playing this I would side with Rachel, but as a middle-aged dad, I'm sorry, if you have to say "I'm an adult!" in every single conversation to justify your decisions you are definitely not an adult.
My favorite character is probably Hyde the vampire, at least partially because he's not a metaphor for a real-world injustice but also because he articulated my viewpoint in the Baileys/Lua situation. Baileys talks about love, about how he's willing to leave his family and who cares about family anyway and Hyde is like "Lua does, did you ever think of that?" Some other patrons say Hyde is a jerk but the truth is that love is not all you need and you're heading for disaster if you think it is.
Plus Hyde and Gala's interactions as very old friends were really heartwarming. This is Seattle, it's more like every corner.
Heartwarming, like a nice cup of coffee. That's my main description of Coffee Talk. It's a chill, low-stress game, with chill low-stress music to go along with people's stories of mostly solvable problems. Despite The Racism Metaphor, most problems in the game aren't really that heavy. Myrtle's problem is working too much overtime, for example, and Freya is really stressed about her novel, she has a coffee shop she can always go to when she wants to write with a nice cup of espresso in front of her. If only we all had a place to go where everyone knew our name, and they were always glad we came.
Like I mentioned above,
sashagee told me about this game, and the reason she knew about it is that she was advertised the sequel: Coffee Talk Episode 2: Hibiscus & Butterfly. I've looked a bit into and read this Rock Paper Shotgun review, which makes me anticipate it a bit and sigh a bit too, but the comment on that review mentions VA-11 HALL-A, another game I've wanted to play for a while. That game you run a bar so the drinks are much more important, but you still get to hear their stories. I checked it out on Steam and the very top review mentions Coffee Talk, so I'm thinking I'll be back both to fantasy Seattle and to the cyberpunk future, where oppression is definitely not a metaphor.