Coffee Talk Review
At the risk of upsetting my girlfriend, mother, and many readers: I think coffee is bad. I thoroughly despise the taste of that foul bean slurry. I can’t understand why so many people consume the stuff, especially considering there are so many products dedicated to making coffee more palatable, whether it be sweetener, creamer, or whatever Starbucks does to it. The only good thing about coffee is coffee houses, because they smell amazing, usually have tasty baked goods and are incredibly relaxing places to be in. It seems the folks at Toge Productions agree with me, at least on the last point, because last week they released Coffee Talk, a game all about hanging out in a coffee shop.
In Coffee Talk, players take the role of the owner and sole employee of a coffee house named Coffee Talk. Coffee Talk is only open at night and is located in an alternate version of Seattle that never stops raining and is populated by people from all sorts of fantasy races, such as elves, orcs, and demons. The odd hours of operation combined with the magical mix of citizens means Coffee Talk has a lot of peculiar customers, all of whom are more than willing to talk about their lives and problems with the player. However, this is not a game in which the player makes choices on what their character will say to affect the story. Instead, the fate of the customers is decided by how well the player can suit their requests for hot drinks. Serve the right drink and things will go well, but serve the wrong drink and any number of misfortunes can occur.
Unfortunately, the brewing of drinks isn’t all that interesting. Making drinks in Coffee Talk follows these steps: At some point in their conversation, a customer will order a drink. More often than not, customers will give the player a set of requirements, either a selection of ingredients, such as “something with coffee and cinnamon,” a list of attributes the drink should have, something along the lines of “a drink that’s warm and bitter,” or occasionally a mix of these themes. This lets the player assemble whatever drink they want from the available ingredients, so long as it meets the customer’s requirements. As the player gets deeper in the story, customers will begin to ask for specific named drinks. If the player hasn’t unlocked the recipes for these drinks, they’re up a creek without a paddle, able to only guess wildly or, more realistically, consult the internet. The whole interaction is pretty simple, consisting of five clicks, more if you prepare the wrong drink and have to start over, and is by far the minority of the time spent with the game. In the six hours it took me to complete Coffee Time’s story, I made only 49 drinks, which translates to about one drink every seven minutes. The simplicity of gameplay combined with the infrequency of its use drives home that the gameplay is not the focus of the game, and instead exists only in service of the story.
Annoyingly, the story of Coffee Time isn’t very engaging either. The thing that bothered me most about the writing was the overabundance of ellipses. Out of any four sentences spoken by a character, three were interrupted at some point by an awkward ellipsis, often more than once. This drove me up the wall, as it only served to slow the plot down and only ever barely made sense for characters to do. Another issue was the overly formal and awkward way everyone spoke, but I suspect that this is because Coffee Talk is made by an Indonesian studio so they don’t have a perfect grasp of the English language. Finally, the writing failed to grab me because so much of it was uninteresting. In a world where vampires and shape-shifters exist, I’m not interested in hearing about the same sort of banal problems we have in our normal human world. When an orc and a mermaid are talking, I’m not interested in hearing about how the mermaid is nervous about demoing her indie video game at a gaming convention or the orc’s frustration at long working hours, I want to hear about how society at large assumes orcs are less intelligent people and thus refuses to accept them in academic fields. Exacerbating this, the daily newspaper the players receive at the beginning of each in-game day touches on these things but goes no further with that idea. The constant focus of my ire on this subject was the customer Freya. Freya is a human woman, a struggling millennial trying to write a novel. When I could be hearing about the troubles of a werewolf customer being affected by ineffective transformation-suppressants being peddled by multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical firms, I’m not interesting in the complaints of a 20-something human.
Under all of these complaints, I do think that Coffee Talk gets one thing right and that’s it’s theme. Because the game is always set during night and during a rainstorm, Coffee Talk has a very strong thematic foundation. Add to that a strong soundtrack of laid-back and relaxing music and a fantastic visual design of the store and customers and the whole game feels like a warm blanket. I liked the various posters, shelves, plants, and coffee-related products that decorated the walls of the shop and the exterior windows, featuring passing silhouettes, helped the setting feel well constructed. The character designs were similarly well crafted, with enough definition to allow for great facial expressions while still pixelated enough to feel low-tech in an endearing and comfortable way.
Maybe I misunderstood Coffee Talk and expected something it never promised, maybe the developers only set out to make a relaxing game about owning a coffee shop and didn’t worry about the wants of a lore-hungry American, but at the end of the day I do think Coffee Talk falls short. This could certainly be another case of a game that’s just not for me. If you like the sound of Coffee Talk, or just want to hear the relaxing music and rain, go ahead and pick it up but I recommend waiting until the price dips a bit. And if you do, do yourself a favor and mess around in the Free Brew mode before you dive into the story.
Buy this game on sale
It’s worth playing, just not at the price they’re asking
