Café Rouge
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Isis Black, your average American teenager, happens upon a part time job opening at Café Rouge. During the day, it is your normal quaint cafe and bakery. When night takes over, it is transformed into a five star restaurant theater cafe, with live stage performances and mysterious customers coming in the middle of the night.
As Isis delves deeper into this strange cafe, she becomes tangled in the mystery of its haunted world. Will she find friend or foe? Will she follow fate or make her own destiny? Will she find love?
That’s for you to decide.
Features
- 3+ Pursue-able love interests
- Customizable name for main character (default is Isis Black)
- 12 Side characters
- Original art and story
- Same beautiful music soundtrack like in the original 2012 game
- 15+ Hours of gameplay
- 50+ CG illustrations
- No annoying cooking mini games (I’m taking them out of this remake)
- Completely new character designs (Isis will no longer have green hair)
Steam User 44
I have yet to complete any good routes, but the story is really good and I like the characters.
There are some technical issues, especially with the endings being unnaccessible if you reached it from a loaded save rather than playing in one go, though this issue is apparently being worked on.
Edit: Issue with loading saves preventing reaching an ending has been fixed.
Also, as others have said, the game is EXTREMELY laggy when skipping, sometimes getting stuck on a line for a second or two making skipping rather slow. Also, if you accidentally trigger auto-play, the only way I found to stop it was to open the menu and toggle it from there to stop it since the UI element outside the menu to do it seems to only activate it, not stop it. Unlike most other visual novels, the skip function just skips everything, there's no option to just skip read dialogue, so this can lead you to skip sections you assume will be the same but suddenly realize there's a difference but you've been mostly skipping it.
I wish there was more control over sounds since there are some screams which are REALLY loud and lowering the sound so they aren't too loud when they happen makes the BGM too quiet to hear. Overall, the sound effects are pretty bad, though the BGM is good which makes it a real shame that sound effects are so loud I have to basically forget hearing the BGM so the sound effects don't get annoying.
Another issue with the game is the author forcing in real world politics into the dialogue with the MC being called a stupid brainwashed liberal, how guns aren't bad because they save lives and how the big bad vampire faction is left wing. I don't care about your political affiliations, but putting them in a game when doing so feels forced as the game would be the exact same without all those political statements is just stupid. If adding real world politics adds to the game, that's fine, but in this case, it's just jarring how unfitting those dialogues are compared to the rest.
Overall, the story is great, but the game is plagued with technical issues which can render the experience irritating. If you can look past these issues, the story is definitely worth it.
Steam User 12
First off, I really love the art! Its so beautiful. I enjoy the story, it's interesting and not really what I have seen before. Soo now here are the pros and cons. I'm also a sucker for vampires (^^b~
Pros:
- GREAT. I mean BEAUUTIFULLL art
- Interesting story
- Plenty of options to choose from
- Developer is very quick with patching the game and updating it.
Cons:
- UI is a little bit buggy. Especially with Auto play since maybe it's user error but sometimes it wouldn't turn off for me when I clicked it a couple times. Not too fond of the sound for when clicking options, but you get used to it.
- There are some grammar/spelling issues but it didn't bug me too much.
- I personally found it really hard to get a good ending... Took me 6.8 hours to get a good ending for one of the characters. Perhaps that's just bad luck (and that I mostly tend to rely on walkthroughs to get good endings).
- Spoiler con: I didn't like the age gap and power dynamic with the MC and Ron... Every time there was something romantic going on between them I always thought back to the age gap with how the MC is 16 and then Ron would've had to been around mid 20s or older. Soo there's that.
Overall: I really enjoyed this game! The art was always pleasing to look at and I'm glad there was attention to detail with the characters stories and design. I'd recommend starting with Valen~. Can't wait for more side characters to come out with their own routes!
I really hope for some badges from this game! Backgrounds would be sooo pretty for the steam profile...
Steam User 10
Ok so- I would give this a mixed rating if I could, but that's not possible, so I'm gonna go for a thumbs up, since I DO honestly believe a lot of the reviews of this game are outdated. I have not completed the game YET, but I feel that I have encountered everything that I need to make a decent review.
For starters: Most of the bugs complained about are patched out at this point. I didn't encounter any major bugs or issues. Occasionally the fades to black when the scene changed would cause a half-second lag, but I've encountered this in other games as well and it hardly detracts from gameplay. Ok, on to my thoughts about the game.
The art is pretty. REALLY PRETTY. I would put it up there as one of the most visually appealing VNs not coming from a major company like Otomate. The cgs were lovely and the sprites were very pleasant to look at as well.
The story was... meh. I can't say it was particularly amazing or particularly bad. There were some points that definitely caught my interest, but sadly not many of them were followed up on. I'd say it falls into the same hole as many other games with about the same length: Too little time to get the story across. With a little work I think this game could be great, but sadly it didn't really get that time. One big gripe I see with most of the reviews for this game is the politics which were... honestly not a big deal to me. If you are an American liberal, I can totally understand why the game could offend you (since it does take a fair few jabs) but otherwise... it's honestly more funny than anything. It'll be all serious and then go "Oh those damn Liberals" And I can't help but laugh at how random it is. So really I can't say it detracted from my experience that much, especially since it really didn't tie into the narrative at all, in the sense that they could just as easily be right wing, or any other political party tbh. It was just there, easy to ignore, or laugh at.
The characters were... decent. I loved their designs, but some of their personalities were a bit lacking, and a tad inconsistent. Even so, they were likable enough that I was interested in how things would turn out for them.
Other than that, the music was fine, the sound effects were fine, if not a bit silly at times, and that's about it.
In conclusion, if you want this game, get it one sale. It's good in some ways, meh in others.
On a side note Ron is 100% based off of Katsuya Honda from Fruits Basket. Which pleases me more than it should.
Steam User 4
*** UPDATED REVIEW ***
This game had me worried for a bit after not seeing any news or updates for months after the Steam release and I thought Sonya Fung really had just dropped it on Steam and left, but thankfully that isn't the case. My first review was a negative one, but now I think that I can give this a tentative positive review, mostly thanks to bug fixes and UI changes.
The UI is much better and more attractive now, the skip and auto buttons actually work most of the time, and a fourth route (Aldo) was added as promised. Do I still think that Café Rouge is worth $20 though? Not yet, but with the bonus content on the way I can easily see it becoming a game worthy of that price. The art is beautiful and there is plenty of it - except for Aldo's route. He only had one CG, and overall it was a very short and unfulfilling route. Nonetheless it's extra content and it'd be nice to see this for every character eventually.
Things I'd still like to see:
A CG Gallery
The rest of the Kickstarter goals added
Some of that weird political crap cut out... it adds nothing to the game and is just bad
Longer endings/better ending screens?
Characters are alright and the writing isn't bad, just don't go into this expecting a masterpiece. Definitely do some research before deciding to buy.
Steam User 1
I did play the first Version of Café Rouge all those years ago, but I didn't really remember. When I saw the Kickstarter, the beautiful art... good memories came back and with the Demo I just fell in love all over again. Understatement: even more, because I developed a HUGE crush on Demian (rather: fell high over heels). I do love all the characters and I like the world building, but nothing captured my heart quite as much as Mr. Sexy-Manager.
So I got in contact with Sonya... and together we did the chapter "Demian's True Love" with Demian and Niara! <3 All I can hope now is that y'all don't hold any flaws and mistakes against me (or the long wait because of my health) and that just most of you enjoy your time in Café Rouge just as much as I did! ~^.^~ Hope you have fun, enjoy!
Steam User 1
This game is at least is playable now that some bugs been fixed. There's still some things that need to be polished, like getting to an ending and it not taking you to the main menu screen, had to reload from a previous game and get a bad end to get back. Sometimes while fast forwarding the story it would get stuck occasionally. Things I would like to see in this game would be a menu to look at unlocked CG's and a way to get to the main menu when reading the story, like next to the save, reload or log. Also a way to exit the game in main menu when in full screen mode instead of switching from full screen to window mode, closing the window to exit that way. Things I liked about this game were the action scenes, for example when a knife gets stabbed through a wall and seeing the main characters facial expressions change. It made it more immersive. The characters were well written, the story was enjoyable, and the art work are beautiful. Overall this game has massive potential just needs to work out a few more kinks.
Steam User 2
I personally had a great time, but the main romance is supposed to be Antoine? While the art is lovely and the story sweet, I felt a lot more meaningful moments were put into the Valen romance.