Since we were talking about Indonesian indies yesterday, it was about time for me to try the Coffee Talk demo. It’s been out for over a year now, but boy does it still feel as warm as a hot chocolate on a cold December rainy day.
Coffee Talk is being developed at Toge Productions where it’s pixeled by one of my favorite artists, Hendry Roesly a.k.a. @iceztiqarts (art lead on the project is Dio Mahesa, an amazing character artist as well). The game is essentially a visual novel in a fantasy 2020 Seattle where you get to listen to everyday stories such as a love drama between an elf and a succubus, an alien’s attempt to understand life on earth, or a dreams-come-true tale of a writer trying to switch from journalism to writing a novel … It all feels incredibly chill and cozy, thanks as well to the lo-fi jazzy soundtrack and the fact that you help these characters feel better by serving them delicious, hot beverages.
As a person who never even tasted coffee in their life, I grew surprisingly in love with becoming a barista. I truly appreciate every game in which I can learn something and thanks to Coffee Talk I finally know a difference between a latte, a cappuccino, and an espresso (if you were as uninitiated as me, it’s basically the amount of milk added to coffee from loads to none at all, in the respective order).
The barista simulator goes so deep that you can even make latte art. Every time a piece of entertainment excites me so much that I pause the movie or alt-tab from a game to go read Wikipedia, my hat is off to you. With Coffee Talk it wasn’t too long before I had YouTube opened, learning how to make hearts, tulips, and rosettas by pouring milk into the steaming blackness.
Here lied my only moment of disappointment: the liquid simulation just isn’t close enough to reality to reproduce what I observed in online tutorials—a missed opportunity to have even more transfer of knowledge between the game and the real world. On the other hand, the misbehaving simulator breeds creativity as you try to find ways to make cool shapes in your own way.
Who knows, maybe the programers did yet another rewrite of the latte simulation since the latest demo came out and the full game will blew me away even more. Everything else in the demo was perfect enough that the incoming release has me incredibly excited regardless. The date we’re looking at right now is January 29, 2020 and may the gods of coffee bless these beans so that brewing completes successfully. Till then you can play the demo yourself or wishlist the game on your favorite store by following links from the game’s website.
