Coffee Noir - Business Detective Game

This game isn't quite what I was expecting. I expected noir, and there was that. And also coffee, which there was. But ultimately this felt like a crash course in business management and negotiation. I'm not a big economics/marketing person, and in a lot of the negotiations I had no idea what the characters were actually talking about (BATNAs and marketing techniques and such), but my lack of knowledge did not majorly impact my ability to play the game. It's an interesting story, but a few things bugged me. There were some grammar and spelling mistakes. It doesn't affect the overall comprehension, but it might bother people who are bothered by things like that. The voice acting works well, but for the more visually oriented it's something to look at. The connections between clues are not particularly intuitive in cases, but maybe that's just my inability to reason them out. You can use some of your profit to reveal the connections and I had to do that more than a few times. Near the end of chapters when you have multiple contracts you aren't actually able to fulfill all tasks, even when you have workers with spare time. There aren't enough contract slots. It would also be nice if tasks could be team efforts, where one employee contributes a few hours, another contributes a few more, and then it gets done and no one has to work overtime. Overall, it's a pretty good game. I'd recommend it to business majors to get familiar with different concepts, and anyone else who likes management games with a bit of story.

I stopped playing after getting the third contract in Act 2. As some have already said, the game pretends to be super complicated in the beginning and swamps you with a LOT of information, so much that you hardly can memorize the important bits about the case and in the end the gameplay is so easy, that none of the tutorial would have been needed. The story is meh and just follows the same problems as the tutorial, meaning you are getting way too much information. Clues often felt misleading, not because they were designed to do so, but because the story got way too confusing way too soon, giving you like 20 characters, who all had to do with each other and clues that almost sound the same, yet you need to pick the 2 right ones. The simulations bit, the music, the voice acting and the world building are actually really good, but what bothered me the most were the many typos and wrong grammar. Someone should have definitely helped them edit that out more. If you like simulations and arent easily put off by complicated designs (as I am), give it a try. We should always support indie companies, it's just that I can't recommend the game.

A content written in a Machiavellian way without any hesitation or restraint. The Negotiations Compendium is one of the best resources I've ever read. It's not just a game, but also a book. Every ruble I spent on it is worth it. I am seeing its benefits in real life too. Now, this is amazing!

The game is REALLY bad both as a business sim and both as an investigation game. The story is just bad and overcomplicated with too many characters and the business part is super simple and repetitive. The investigation is made up of connecting clues in a way that is neither engaging nor intuitive...and can be skipped by having the game connect them automatically for some of our profit. The good parts of the game is the atmosphere - mostly the music and the graphics. Also it would have been nice to have the grammar checked by someone as there are annoying grammar errors every once in a while. Overall: I played until the finish, but i'm really disappointed overall.

I like the concept and I like that I learned about negotiation. I struggled with the game play. In particular, I really balked at the part where you connect clues. It seemed random what was a proper connection and what was wrong because there were valid connections between all of the clues. So it felt like rock, paper, scissors in the end.

I absolutely loved the demo - it was fresh, a great combination of business simulation and detective work. The artwork is pleasant, the voice acting is marvellous. So I was eager to buy this game. And then it started to get disappointing ... The reason is that is doesn't develop much after the demo. In the demo you get the impression that you will be busy with managing staff, developing their skills and your manufacturing, growing your business while finding out the mystery you have to solve. That is in a way true, but the managing part is not much to write home about. You produce with a click, you allocate staff with a click and so on. There is far less behind it than I thought after the demo. The characteristics of the different employees don't really matter much, training them has no major impact, improving their work satisfaction is also done with a click and requires no knowledge about the personalities. So, yes, you get a nice file about each employee, but the content is irrelevant. Production is the same - there isn't anything to think about, you click here and there and everything runs smoothly. When you negotiate, there are some things that influence the outcome and that's a good idea, but not really developed very thoroughly. The decisions and their impact are minor. So the business simulation part is extremely basic and gets stale quickly. I found that extremely disappointing, especially as the demo made it appear more sophisticated. The detective part is a bit more thorough but basically you click yourself through dialogues and then get loads of cards with information. These are the clues you gather and to proceed you need to combine the clues. The system for doing that is absolutely abysmal. There is little logic to what constitutes a link and what doesn't. Trying to find it out is mainly tedious clickwork. I came annoyed by it and decided to use the automatic linking once to get an idea of the mechanism, of what to look out for. Well - it still didn't make sense to me why one thing is considered a link and another thing isn't. The clue overview board is gigantic, you only see a small part in detail and again have to scroll and click around far too much. I played games where you need to combine facts and deduce things and all of them did it far better than this game. So, the detective part isn't great either. It's interesting to learn more about the events, but that's not enough for a game, that's nice for an interactive novel. The thoughts are there and I have the impression that there is dedication in the game (as I mentioned, the artwork and the voice acting are a pleasure), but the business simulation part is far too basic and the detective part is too tedious. I find myself not enjoying this game and not wanting to continue it.

Good game, although I got so wrapped up in the coffee business I almost didn't care to solve the mystery. I really wish there were more people available to do business with, work with and expand the business. I wanted to be starbucks, dammit. Had a perfect ending for a perfect job in retail.

Not fond of the voice acting of the MC. Lovely art though.

The musictrack itself contains coughing noises, which makes the game unplayable for somebody with misophonia. Unless you play without music but that is one of the sellingpoints of the game.

This is a very thematic game, and very enjoyable in terms of being immersed in the story. It reminds me of a visual novel, in that the story feels like it is on rails, but nonetheless, if you are looking to dive into a thematic story, this is a good choice. In terms of how good of a game it is, it is alright. I can't say anything bad about it at all. Just feels a little deterministic. The lessens its replay-ability, so one play through is all you'll probably get out of it. But that one play through is well worth it.