Coffee Noir - Business Detective Game

The investigation seem nice and the game is polished. But the coffee management is not very interesting and out of the box. And you can only deduct 3 times per day for deduction. And the evidence are not really good enough to allow you to understand which connection is a good one. I feel like i'm losing my time playing it, the story seem interesting and all. Two things don't go right in this game : - The connections between evidence are random. Impossible to know what is good one, one is a bad one. - The "good" line to improve contact attitude seem random also. You have no clue to be able to guess what is the good line. Devs put a hard work in this project, it's sad for me to be force to put a bad review. I do not really wish to continue further. It's just not fun.

This is where steam needs a "neutral" response. Pros: + Solid little detective story. Got plenty of whodunnits and a HUGE cast of characters + Having the premise be a detective disguised as a salesman actually do sales and run a little management company is an interesting twist. Cons: - The management part was too straight forward. Once you knew what you were doing you could ignore a lot of it (marketing, inventory management) and everything just kind of ran itself. - The jump to the next chapter was a huge problem as it would cancel all your contracts so your finances took a big hit and it would take awhile to get up and running again but you would do so in the exact same way every time. - The story felt unsatisfying at the end. There was a lot of plot holes and once you learn "The Twist" a lot of the events don't make a lot of sense anymore. A lot of elaborate loops that are exciting in the lead up but when you look at it from the lens of The Big Bad Evil Guy it's all kind of silly.

This is a good game, well thought out, and the graphics are amazing. That said, the difficulty level is quite hard, and it feels like a lot of "work". When I first saw coffee noir, I thought it would be about a detective going into coffee shops and talking to people, or maybe managing a small cafe. I didn't plan on managing a large coffee company! I wish there was a "walkthrough" mode that just highlights what to do to keep things moving and learn the story. I'm a good chunk of the way through but I can't bring myself to play it again since it just feels like too much work to manage all of that. Overall, I'd recommend this game, it functions smoothly and well, and there's been a lot of thought, time and effort put into it. If you like management or planning-type games you will like this, but if you're looking for something easy such as a relaxing detective story, this won't be for you.

'coffe shop simulator' fixed that title for you. as i think its too much focused on the 'coffe shop' part and not enough on the storywriting/role playing part. whatever this is. its not what it claim to be.

Muito bom o jogo, mas não é pra todo mundo se tu curte game de gerenciamento com bastante leitura (em ingles), esse jogo é para voce

It's a first impression. I might change my mind latter. If I come back... The writing is similar to the acting : it feels off. The sound mixing feels off too. Music can be just right, or to loud form scene to scene. The voice of the actors can saturate, regularly. The two genre, buisness tycoon and detective work, don't mend well, but like for the rest, I feel it comes from the execution, not the idea. The biggest indicator for that might be the tutorial and detective mechanics : heavy handed, not intuitive, time consuming for little in return. Like for the uchronia obsessed with coffee and the neverdying style of the 20s, it has a charm. But something does not feel right. A sort of uncanny valey, but for design. It could have worked. But [i]something[/i] is off. Some issue for the voice acting. It's competent. But not good. The lines lack coherence and direction. I even noticed some blatant error in the text ("mother" being replaced by "father"), or in the actor direction (a shy person acting confidently). Some people compliment the art, the drawing, and so on, but it's no stranger to issues. Character's hair color can change for no reason, and faces can be difficult to recognize from place to place. I might be wrong (probably in fact, I am a nobody after all), but it feel, look, and sound like a project that lacked coordination or a clear enough vision of what it wanted to do.

Very good game overall, chapeau bas! I played the game with my wife on TV after more or less figuring out how to do company management. One of the strongest points of the game is the investigation and the story, although it's very much aided by fitting visuals and really great soundtrack. The story is convoluted and satisfying to discover (although connecting clues is not well executed but you can skip it) with a really strong finale. We didn't mind the management part: it's rather on the simple side and probably not for min-maxers (it's hard not to overwork employees when you sign all contracts with high prices). If like me you'd like to focus on the story, I can give a tip on the management part: yes, you will need some money for the story, but no need to go hoarding like a dragon and then worry about employees' motivation, while making the game longer and less enjoyable. I suggest hiring full set of employees in the first chapter (ignore the ones with project management), training them to the max, spending whole chapter 1 all weeks making money, then starting chapter 2 maybe take 2 easy contracts and maybe 1 (rest very easy), enough to get you to 200k, maybe 300k to be safer, and then you can stop worrying about money and employees and you can take all contracts very easy (just to cover costs). Then you can breeze through the story without stopping and without prolonging chapters.

Overall: The game has some neat elements and some very likable aspects. The story IS curious and it's kinda fun just going through the motions for a while. As long as you understand up front that you're not really playing a detective GAME...or a business management GAME....that you're mostly just engaging in an interactive story, it's actually pretty okay :) I hit a couple of glitches here and there, but nothing game breaking. Translations are a bit off at times, but not terribly so. Music is nice but with limited tracks on repeat, gets old quickly. That said. This is neither a very in depth mystery detective game OR a business management game. ...just a story which is almost impossible not to uncover and some gimmicks to make it interactive. If that's NOT what you're looking for....then this game isn't for you. The art and overall feeling is nice. With few exceptions, I think the interface works rather well! the music got old quickly. Within my first hour playing I muted it and just put on some generic Detective Noir music from Youtube instead. The story's not bad. I don't feel invested enough with it to finish the game, but I have enjoyed the story and characters so far. As far as the Detective aspect goes...there is no skill involved in talking with people. No matter how the conversation goes, you're going to get the information you need to continue. After some conversations, a comic book style bit of narrative will pop up and it's a nice bit of story...but doesn't always seem to fit with the discussion/experience you just had. The only actual "detective" work you do is combining clues in what feels like a VERY arbitrary way. If you don't figure out all of the connections before running out of time for the chapter, you can literally just save/load your game repeatedly to brute force your way through it OR buy the solutions with money from your business. ...speaking of Business....when it comes to negotiating contracts, managing your employees and inventory....there's very, very little you actually DO. Unless you're just very unlucky or VERY bad with your resource management you'll never run out of money. Not in the first half of the game, at least. Don't know if later chapters pull a fast one on you at some point. There are very few options for doing anything outside of just ordering product and shipping it to your contracted clients for pre-arranged prices. Negotiating the contracts is fun, but also just an exercise of navigating pre-set trees of conversation with no clear idea where they'll lead. There are also times where you'll have literally just conceded to giving the client something like an 11% discount, do some bantering without even trying to get a better price and the other person just magically asks for a 4% discount instead (giving you a much better deal for no reason). You don't pick the negotiation numbers at any point. While you can do some guesswork based on what you know about the client, you literally have no way of knowing for sure which responses will navigate you to the best outcome without retrying the conversation a few times. Aside from the initial price you offer (which has no further bearing on anything for negotiating) you have ZERO actual control over your counter-offers outside of pre-set conversation choices...some of which don't even TELL you that you're about to offer the client a lower price until after you picked them. Something neat which I liked: when negotiating, many times the negotiation tactic being used is actually labeled as part of your response. In your office is a tablet where you can read up on different tactics. You don't NEED to know any of this at any point. But from a nerd level, I severely appreciated it. Employee management is simple. ...almost too simple. You may find out the hard way that you can only have 4 of a given task-type on your job board, even though there are 5 envelopes. ....the 5th envelope is just there for the game to put stuff in that "you don't have room to schedule on the board." This ultimately means that you can't send all 5 employees to get additional job training at the same time. ...or you are LITERALLY LIMITED IN HOW MUCH YOU CAN CHARGE FOR COFFEE. ...yup. If you negotiate a price which is too high, your client now requires an additional job slot on the board for "Premium services." Doing this with two clients ties up ALL of your job slots for managing accounts, even if you have employees with extra working hours available to manage ALL accounts just fine. (I had to restart the 2nd chapter because I learned the hard way after realizing that I just signed a contract with a third client and then couldn't assign an employee to their account). After you've finished all of the story components for a chapter, there's literally nothing else to do. You're not *really* running a business, so you're just going through the basic motions of keeping some numbers balanced from week to week. There's no more story to pursue until you connect all of the clues and move on to the next chapter. I found myself doing the equivalent of grinding for XP...just running out the clock to earn as much money as I could with my given setup before moving on. Neat idea with lots of potential. Not much of a 'game' though. Just know what you're getting and manage your expectations before picking this one up.

An intriguing noir storyline, mixed with an pretty fun business sim. It's unique, and reommended.

Cute game, but note this is more like a graphic novel than anything. The replay ability is super low for the game, that being said, it's super interesting. I'm not mad I bought it as it's like a novel I would buy. The economics in this game is super well done and the story is really interesting. I still recommend this if you like visual novels. My full review is below: [spoiler] I picked up this game because it was a recommendation on steam. It's basically a computer graphic novel detective story and a coffee empire simulator. There is a mystery and you are tasked to solve it, all while building your coffee empire in Neo-London in an alternate 2021. The story line takes a "Steampunk" approach to the world but instead of Victorian ideals making it to the future, it's 1950s style detective/aesthetic going forward. Oh, and everyone is OBSESSED with coffee. Honestly, it's truly a unique idea for a story and the artwork is pretty neat. Pros: - gameplay was straightforward. As a person who gets frustrated easily with difficult games, this was not it - you can save as much as you want and can go back and redo convos if you remember to save beforehand - music was very detective - the storyline was fairly unique Cons: - no walkthroughs so I had to wing it - almost 0 replay value - a TONNNN of misspellings in the English version. There were uncapitalized i's and triple letters in some places - It almost seemed too wordy in places and I kinda got bored and forgot halfway through what exactly I was trying to solve. - With the above comment there were like 10 concurrent stories, probably why it was difficult to follow - bloody/violent if you aren't into that (it's a 1950s detective game, what did you expect) Overall, not sure if I'd recommend it or not. I enjoyed it but maybe would have enjoyed watching a streamer go through it not sure. I didn't *not* enjoy it just was kinda iffy on it. I think they could have cut down on the concurrent storylines tbh. [/spoiler]