Coffee Talk

This game honestly brings it all together.
Relaxing gameplay, good music, and a great story.
It helped me relax through some pretty rough patches of life.
I'll gladly recommend this game to anyone reading, one of the most memorable games I've played :)

I would highly recommend playing it with voice mods if you're into that
Coffee Talk is a heartwarming game where you can serve customers and see stories unfold. Thats the most basic explanation. Now the actual game itself...I don't think there was a single customer that I didn't care about. You get to see so many highs and lows, discussions and arguments, and it all feels like a warm, lively place to be in overall. Coffee Talk is meant to be cozy but also it doesn't shy away from conflict, which makes it more believable. Even if its short, it still felt like a long time.
Also the music slaps, I've been using it for study sessions.

THIS GAME IS A THERAPY
I'm trying to get 100% completion.
---{ Graphics }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☑ ABSOLUTELY GORGEOUS, but not realistic.
☐ Beautiful
☐ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS
---{ Gameplay }---
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't
---{ Audio }---
☑ Eargasm
☐ Very good
☐ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf
---{ Audience }---
☑ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults
☑ Grandma
---{ PC Requirements }---
☑ Check if you can run paint
☐ Potato
☐ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer
---{ Game Size }---
☑ Floppy Disk
☐ Old Fashioned
☐ Workable
☐ Big
☐ Will eat 15% of your 1TB hard drive
☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it
☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data
---{ Difficulty }---
☑ Just press 'W'
☐ Easy
☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls
---{ Grind }---
☑ Nothing to grind
☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☐ Isn't necessary to progress
☐ Average grind level
☐ Too much grind
☐ You'll need a second life for grinding
---{ Story }---
☐ No Story
☐ Some lore
☐ Average
☐ Good
☐ Lovely
☑ It'll replace your life
---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☑ Short
☐ Average
☐ Long
☐ To infinity and beyond
---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☑ Worth the price
☐ If it's on sale
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money
---{ Bugs }---
☑ Never heard of
☐ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs
---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☐ 6
☐ 7
☐ 8
☐ 9
☑ 10
---{ You can skip this part }---
I met this game and played it during some tough times. It was mt therapy. It got me relaxed. it made me forget my life. It got me worried about the characters problems... and the one things I absolutely hated about it was that it was too short for me. If I could, I'd want 100 hours worth of content at least.
You CAN replay the game and I halfway thought my second play. Actually, playing it a second time is part of the main story. besides, I am trying to get 100%

I have now completed my first playthrough of Coffee Talk and feel ready to write a review for it.
The game takes place in an alternate reality where all the fantasy races exist side-by-side. Your character is a barista, and also the owner, of a coffee shop in Seattle. Every day, customers come, you make drinks for them, and they tell you about their problems. Other customers who are at your coffee shop at the same time, often act as agony aunts/advice columnists, even though you also occasionally put in a remark or two - and always lend a sympathetic ear! When the customers return on a different day, their story continues. And the storyline is excellent! All the characters are more complex than they appear at first - including the barista.
Initially, I was a bit disappointed by the lack of actual drink-making - there are never more than 3 customers a day, ordering one drink each, and the rest is just talking. However, the game also has the Endless section, which has two modes - a Free mode, where you make drinks mixing ingredients in any way you like, and a Challenge mode, where various in-game characters tell you what drinks they want you to make and you fulfil the orders on a timer. Both these modes are very good for unlocking drinks for your menu earlier than they appear in the story.
The highest-rated negative review for this game criticises it for the lack of depth and seriousness in handling the issues it raises, but I disagree. The developers of Coffee Talk have obviously realised that not every game needs to be an anonymous hotline, and are content with being advice columnists. And while the issues raised are not particularly tragic, they are all very widespread.
I would also like to praise the game for accessibility. The Challenge mode mentioned earlier is the only one with a timer. I found the default conversation auto-scrolling speed to be perfect for me, making for a very relaxing experience. Finally, although the latte art is quite hard to do "beautifully", I was only tasked with doing it once during the story. I made a random blob with the milk, served it, and the customer still called it "cute" - no problems there.
In summary - an absolutely wonderful game!

thought i’d just open it for 10 minutes… next thing i know, an hour’s gone. super chill, cozy and way more addictive than i expected. perfect little escape.

Coffee talk is a fantastic contribution to the cosy visual novel genre. A lush visual presentation combined with a calming soundtrack serves as a fantastic catalyst to tell a story that feels written from the heart. While the game's main mechanic doesn’t get much time in the sun, it will still hook you into the experience.
Positives:
Wonderful aesthetic, soundtrack and atmosphere that does a fantastic job of reeling you in. The coffee making format of storytelling is immersive (but flawed) fun that serves as an amazing foundation for future titles.
Negatives:
There are some clashes with the coffee making mechanics and the story telling itself, with the mechanic feeling like it’s not used to full potential.
Neutrals:
Going for 100% is quite easy but guide material is almost certainly required to do so.
The Details
Game Mechanics and Game Flow
Given this game is a visual novel at heart, I’m going to take this section to just discuss the main mechanic of interaction within the story, that being making coffee. The coffee making is a great idea and its execution in theory feels quite satisfying to pull off. However, this is a mechanic that is just not given enough support to fully bloom.
The mechanic boils down to essentially serving what drink is requested (or sometimes what you believe should be served) which then opens up the characters to sharing more dialogue with you. I personally think that this base idea works fine,however I found myself wishing what drinks you served were easier to intuit. Half of the drinks required to serve for major plot events are not told to you, leaving you to either figure out the recipe in endless mode or use a guide.
A saving grace for this would have been better use of clues through the story, allowing for more moments where the puzzle pieces click together and you realise; “Now is the time” for this drink. It would have given some great payoffs and would give the player far more agency in gameplay. It would have strongly promoted the player's place as an active listener throughout the story. Some parts of the story toy with this idea but it doesn’t go far enough in my opinion.
Visuals
There’s plenty of merits this game can proudly wear and visuals is one of them. Fantastic pixel art, with very evident time and love put into all of the characters designs. The backgrounds are well designed as well, with the coffee shop itself being centre stage for the entire story. Each character sprite as well does a fantastic job of conveying their emotions as well, with a wide selection of expressions across the board to assist with providing feeling to spoken word.
Story
A Visual novel without good writing is like having a shotgun without shells. Thankfully, this game delivers on this front quite well. Your role in the story is as an open ear, with you sitting back listening to various people’s woes and issues. If you provide the right drink and a kind word here and there, you’ll help these people see their problems through.
First, the framing of the world in a more fantasy driven world I think is actually a great choice. While you can make the point that nothing extravagant is done with this world, I believe it’s actually a great catalyst for talking about issues of prejudice and discrimination without having to dismantle a real world issue directly (Although the game does get a smidge on the nose about this at one point)
Second, the characters and their arcs themselves. While all story arcs in this game are not created equal, each one of them do have notes they hit that are bound to resonate. I don’t want to elaborate too much as these games benefit greatly from playing blind. But I can give my reassurances and say this story is worth experiencing.
Audio
The soundtrack for this is a gem as well, providing a fantastic album (composed by one artist) full of lo-fi beats that serve as fantastic background that don’t detract from the action (that being reading and making coffee). There are a few songs that are a bit harsher on the ears than others but you have full control over what song plays so that’s no worries.
As for sfx, it’s solid. The usual clatters of shuffles of a coffee shop are captured just fine. The sounds for dialogue advancement are also crisp and non intrusive on the ears too.
As a side note, there is no voice acting in the game but on the workshop, some dedicated fans have fully voice acted the entire game so if you like your dialogue spoken, you’re in luck.
Longevity and Achievement List Review
For this review, I did one big playthrough of the story, going for the final ending which took me approximately 4 hours. To elaborate, I read fairly fast so that playtime can have a lot of variance. I also did use a guide at some point to assist at some points as well in the story.
Going for the achievements in this game was a fairly easy ride, only adding an additional 2 hours to my playtime. This was mainly spent staring at latte art for an hour and playing challenge mode (Which very much requires guide material as well). The achievements in this game were all very fun and natural to get, with only two being a bit silly in hindsight (those being making latte art for an hour and chucking out a load of drinks)
As an additional note, the game includes a fantastic gallery mode to enjoy once you have finished your adventure, which includes lots of great concepts, pieces, comics and art from the games development. A really nice treat once you have finished the story and the challenge mode!

Coffee Talk is a great game to relax to. I decided to play this when I was pretty burnt out on video games – I'd just finished Persona 3 Reload along with Episode Aigis (~150 hours!) and felt like my head would explode if I saw another randomized turn-based encounter.
Coffee Talk turned out to be the perfect remedy for that. In this game, you read conversations between characters who show up at your late-night coffee shop in a fantasy-world Seattle. People of all sorts of fantastical races show up to talk, work, and relax. The ambiance of the game is very similar to a real-life coffee shop, with lo-fi beats playing in the background. The only thing you need to do is fulfill customer orders as they come in (don't worry, there's no time-crunch like Overcooked or PlateUp) and listen to your customers as they talk about life. Very low-stress and relaxing – just what I wanted.
I found the character storylines in this game to be hit-or-miss. While there are a few that are almost painfully stereotypical, there are some that are very interesting. Hint: if you stick around until the end of this game, watch the post-credits scene. One of the best stories gets even more interesting at that point. Despite the predictability of the storylines, however, I did always enjoy listening to the characters interact with each other. The game does a great job at depicting how people who are very different might talk with each other.
While most of the writing was pretty good, there were many sentences that sounded unnatural. It wasn't enough to really detract from my enjoyment of the game, but it was enough for me to be disappointed that more effort wasn't put into the localization and editing of the script.
The visual style of this game is really fun. I enjoyed the HD pixel style and the character's reaction animations during conversations.
Honestly, the most disappointing part of this game is the gameplay. The only interactive part of this game is making drinks for customers. When you get an order, the game brings you to an ingredients shelf and asks you to pick three ingredients – one to use as a base, another as a primary ingredient, and a third as a secondary. Much of the time, it is very obvious how you should make the drink (for example, espresso). However, sometimes the customer will ask for something like "a drink that will make me feel something." I don't know how I would have made that drink without looking it up. There were other times when the drink they ordered wasn't common and wasn't in English either. I definitely used some google-fu to figure those out.
Frustratingly enough, progress on certain storylines is gated behind getting the correct drink. Because of the lack of hints, people who insist on playing this blind could be in for multiple playthroughs. I had no qualms about using search engines, however, so it was just a minor annoyance for me.
This is probably a minor nit, but I do wish there were more interaction options beyond just making drinks. A simple dialog choice system seems like it would not rock the boat too hard and would help players stay engaged.
Conclusion
Overall, I recommend this game. It was a good break from the RPGs I've been playing lately. The chill music and conversations also helped me relax in a rather stressful season of my life. I'd rate this 3/5 (Good).