Coffee Talk Tokyo Review - A Caffeinated Brew for Success

A six-year-long wait and a delay finally saw developer Toge Productions launch their anticipated visual novel game, Coffee Talk Tokyo, which they collaborated on with Chorus Worldwide. Following a similar recipe from previous releases, this new delectable offering gives us a brand new story driven by social interactions through chance encounters with diverse characters, including humans and mythical creatures, set in modern Tokyo, Japan.

As a barista running this chill anaba, you'll encounter your regulars as well as establish connections with new faces and one returning visitor who makes the trip from Seattle. But your story is very much unknown, yet you play quite a significant role in the lives of these customers who come to you for more than just their daily drink order.

Hitting The (Coffee) Grounds Running

The story unfolds during the electrifying nighttime hours, in which, as the local barista, you get to listen in on thoughtful conversations between the dynamic characters that visit this cozy late-night café. Serving warm and cold brews based on the clues these customers provide helps them open up to you and others at the coffee bar about feelings of guilt, disappointment, love, loss, identity crises, and fresh starts.

In the same breath, your involvement in these conversations lets you make pivotal dialogue choices that can influence outcomes for these characters, and this is done one ice-cold or warm brew at a time. You can also find context clues when browsing your feed on the in-game app called Tomodachill by unlocking hidden posts through hashtags, including drink recipes.

No shift is the same at this cozy late-night café, as the orders will differ per customer, and so too are the character interactions and the entertaining, heartfelt conversations. As such, these open up the potential to unlock unique endings that are influenced by your dialogue choices made through the interactions and conversations with the characters that come seeking refuge and comfort at this café.

To Brew Or Not To Brew

Coffee Talk Tokyo follows a heavy story-centric gameplay that involves conversational dialogue, text-based messaging, and contextual clues that prioritize reading and analysis to uncover future plot points. Assuming the role of a local barista who spends every shift behind the coffee bar of this cozy late-night café, the spotlight is on branching storylines that are, to a degree, influenced by the hot and cold brews you serve your customers.

Every customer has a unique order each time they visit the café, and contextual clues may help you whip up a tasty drink using the ingredients available, but do pay attention to whether they may love or disapprove of the beverage. Speaking of these tasty hot and cold brews, discovering the recipes can be done by pairing unique ingredient combinations using contextual clues provided by a customer, finding them through Tomodachill hashtag posts, or just on a whim.

Once the drink has been made, certain brews will give you the option to showcase your barista skills through coffee art, whether it's adding latte art or spending time "etching" it before serving it. This can be a fun endeavour to pursue, or if you wish to create your own latte art over using stencilled templates, it can be a rewarding experience which could earn you an accomplishment.

Using the Tomodachill app is very easy, as all it requires is opening it up on your in-game mobile device to browse the timeline through hashtagged posts that expand the Coffee Talk world. Luckily, players don't have to worry about doomscrolling; however, there are certain posts that expand the Coffee Talk world, tease characters who have yet to visit the café, and allude to future plotlines and character endings.

Not Everyone's Cuppa Tea

The developers have made some improvements to the game, like the inclusion of a "Forward" button to quickly advance dialogue without doing it manually and a message chat box to read through past dialogue if missed or skipped. As helpful as this feature can be to slightly speed up dialogue, it can at times hinder the gameplay experience, even when the dialogue sections can be slightly tedious to explore and experience.

Sure, not every aspect of the game is near perfection, as our coffee brewing skills, as players' engagement with the game will differ from one person to the next. One such example, especially for players unfamiliar with visual novel games, is that players will realize, once in the early game, that despite playing the role of a local barista, they're more of an observer, a watcher, due to their only involvement in-game.

Your main goal is to listen attentively and make drinks, which, in the wrong order, only changes the dialogue, and not directly picking these options, which may leave players slightly disappointed if they're looking for "pick-your-adventure" gameplay. It may not have the interactive narrative that players seek, as dialogues are slightly affected based on whether you made the right or wrong drink order for your customers instead.

Likewise, players may feel like these dialogue sections are too lengthy, especially with no breaks or interactivity, like making hot or cold brews for the customers, for example, to offset this. Coffee Talk Tokyo does boast a great variety of drinks from coffee to herbal teas, traditional beverages to fruity-flavored treats that can be served either hot or cold, with greater room for discovery and making mistakes.

Despite the developers expanding the coffee brewing system, however, they could have better explained the system, for which a quick tutorial would have been beneficial for this purpose. Sure, most customers will provide some clues as to what ingredients they want in their order, or if they want it served hot or cold, it still leaves room for you to potentially screw up an order, and as such, alter the outcomes for the characters.

Coffee Talk Tokyo Review | Final Thoughts

As straightforward as the gameplay is in Coffee Talk Tokyo, it's a wonderfully brewed entry in the series that puts human physical connections upfront and center. And in doing just that, you get to meet colorful and enchanting characters who have unique backstories to discover, and that can be fully explored when serving them tasty hot and cold drinks.

Awaiting you at this cozy late-night café are interesting tales to tell, share their hopes and fears, as well as their dreams and goals with you. The developers haven't done much to shake up or reinvent the formula, there's so much more to enjoy and uncover in this enigmatic experience long after the final sip has been consumed.

As such, if a strikingly strong story, a great cast of characters, warm and cozy vibes, and a stellar soundtrack, then Coffee Talk Tokyo is exactly up your alley! However, if the opposite is true, there are plenty of nuanced stories to find beyond the warmth of this coffee shop.

Coffee Talk Tokyo was reviewed on PC via Steam, with a copy provided by the publisher over the course of 13 hours - all screenshots were taken during the review.