When life gets tough, people tend to reach for this comfort and encourage them more to endure it. For most people, that would be just a good cup of coffee; they develop ways to get around the time when they will find you, find their favorite coffee that suits their style, and get to know the baristas that serve their favorite drink. Toge Productions grinds on this concept in Coffee Talk, a collaborative experience that demonstrates the powerful relationships that can be formed around cuppa joe. While this theme makes for some engaging dialogue, the text crosses the fence of clichés that go right where you expect.
Coffee Talk is set in Seattle in 2020, but it is not a real picture. In this state of reality, creatures such as youwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww had had been had, Elves build startups, streams create automotive empires, and orcs use computers instead of axes for job satisfaction. He plays as the owner and barista of a small coffee shop – one of the few open spaces at midnight. Your work? Fill out requests to drink patrons and listen to their concerns.
It is important to get into Kofi Speak knowing that it tells a story; the first is a visual novel. This is not a game of choice, and it has no negotiation options. The only control you have on how events are sometimes played plays out well on drinking orders. For example, if you get a special concoction, you can help the werewolf to vent its anger. The game is about capturing the relationships that develop between a barista and their customers. Many times you just watch the interaction play out between the other customers who have also formed friendships because of their shared interest in coffee overnight.
In such a difficult text game, the dialogue is well done, accompanied by a few grammatical errors. I really liked the banter among everyone. It's not all fun and games, though. Coffee Talk gets creative and uses its characters to find a variety of issues in society, from racism to the deepest. Sometimes writing spreads philosophically. For example, it discusses that even though the world was one race, we still find the difference between ourselves and use it to make others careless.
I love that Coffee Talk asks these questions, but they do that in tangible, well-dressed ways. You have an elf and a succubus whose parents want them to marry within their species. The father struggles to allow his daughter to make her own mistakes, while the daughter seems oblivious to how little her life is. These cases feel very normal, and they happen without a lot of surprises. The most interesting news centers on Neil, a mysterious person from another planet who's just looking to breed and enter the world of dating apps. If anything, Coffee Talk sounds like a game full of interesting ideas that are only recognizable. I had more fun with the ideas than the execution.
If you don't talk to consumers, you create their own drinks, and this is the only way you can show the people you've been listening to. In one case, customers say, "I've done something normal." Sometimes, they say, "I am surprised." Sometimes they make requests that you cannot make directly, which forces you to make progress. Many recent game requests need to be checked, and sometimes you just panic in the dark. At the very least, you can snag a drink up to five times before using it, and the upload menus sometimes provide directions on how to create a cafe for fans.
The specifications needed to make the drinks are exhausting. For example, you get one main ingredient and the other two. The order in which you add the second ingredients may change the drink you make. You can have all the right ingredients, and yet endure the trial and error to do what you want. And the controls (on the PS4, at least) make creating latte art harder than it should, to the point where I had to stop worrying about it. Aside from this annoyance, it was fun trying to open up all kinds of different drinks.
Coffee Talk is fantastic. From time to time, it becomes difficult to see how far you want to see certain topics, sometimes giving a very clear overview of the issue at hand. I still had fun during my playing career, and genuinely cared about the characters and their journey – even if the trip would not go to unexpected places.
