Coffee Talk

I spent most of yesterday finishing Coffee Talk, a little...well, I guess slice-of-life is the most accurate description.  A little slice of life game.  It took me ten hours to play through it three times to see all the dialogue and get all the achievements, though I think I still missed the worst outcomes for two of the characters.  This would only change a line or two of text at the end, so I'm not too bothered.  The game cost me £8.24, so each hour of gameplay was about 80p.  Games obviously aren't good or bad based solely on price, I just like to work that out.  In this case, I think 80p per hour was worth it for the enjoyment received.  I can absolutely see myself playing this again, once enough time has gone by to erode the memory of the details.  Plus, I'm considering starting a twitch stream, and since this game is set 5 minutes into the future - starting 22 September 2020 - it would be quite fun to do a real-time replay, one day per day.  

The game play is mostly just sitting and watching people talk.  You're a barista in a late-night coffee shop.  There are no dialogue options - though your character does talk, you just don't get to decide what they'll say - and most of the gameplay is in putting drinks together.  

With the right drinks you can make people feel more or less comfortable, which makes them more or less friendly with you and each other, which affects their relationships and how their story ends.  You can also affect a few other things, for example, one character is writing a novel, and requires endless doses of caffeine, and another is a werewolf whose Fury can be lessened with the right drink.  You can also make latte art, though it doesn't affect anything.

What I like about this game is that I really cared about the characters and I wanted to hear what they had to say, even if I couldn't influence it, and it was, at some times, more like watching a movie.  It compares very favourably with 1bitheart, another game which focused on relationships between characters.  That game introduced 45 characters over about 4 hours of gameplay, and I didn't care about any of them.  This game - like Persona 4, and maybe the others but I haven't played them - spreads out fewer characters over a longer period of time, so you can actually grow to care for them and their stories.

The games set in a world where various fantasy creatures all exist and interact.  Like Discworld, only modern-day Seattle rather than Steampunk Victoriana.  I say modern day Seattle - characters have smartphones, but smoking indoors is absolutely fine.  The barista starts each day with a screen of the newspaper headlines, giving you an insight into the wider world, and many characters are affected by them.  One couple, an Elf and a Succubus, are both fighting against their parents' racial prejudice.  The writer intends to put this in her book, a fantasy about a world where only humans exist.  The characters question how this kind of conflict can be portrayed with only one race, and the writer suggests that people would be prejudiced against one another based on smaller differences, like skin colour or culture.  I really liked that bit because, when phrased like that, it really does sound absurd.