Coffee Noir - Business Detective Game

I was really excited for this game and have been eyeing it for years now, but now that I actually got to play it I'm just...disappointed. Firstly: The idea of mixing a detective/mystery visual novel and business management was great. It's a really nice concept and the vibe in general is really great. The team really did a great job here - the art, the music and the setting feel very fitting and generally leave room for an interesting story. The execution, however, feels somewhat lacking. In general. things just don't mix all too well. There's a rather boring introduction which didn't do a great job of drawing you into the story. The VA's aren't that great, ranging from 'I sound incredibly bored' to 'I am AI generated'. After that, you're immediately dropped into a truly horrible tutorial section and this is where ♥♥♥♥ truly goes downhill because somehow, for some reason, the tutorial explains everything and nothing at the same time. It will shove you from left to right and be like 'click this' 'click that' 'do this so that you can do this' and yet by the end of it I still had to take a minute to just click through everything on my own to get a proper feel for the interface and it's functions without a speech-bubble limiting my access to things so that I could understand what exactly was going on. Admittedly, I'm rather critical where tutorials are concearned, so I was willing to overlook this because it could just be a me thing. So on I went, happy to get to the business parts and open to see the story flourish a bit futher. And this is where things got even worse. As I said, the visual novel aspect and the business aspect don't mix all too well in this one and that is mainly because the way the story is shoved along feels both random and aggressive. The minute you're really into the management you'll be ripped out of it again by some story snippets which just keeps you from getting too into it. The story itself feels a bit...flat, at least until the point I reached and that, paired with the subpar voice acting, really makes for irritating interruptions. You do half a thing and suddenly the VA announces that there is more story to look at - many of which feel like a filler chapter - and that there are some nonsense clues to note down on his board. Now, thankfully, most story clips are short which could make them managable if it weren't for the frequency with which a linear "interrogation" or straight up comic-chapter is thrown at you. Being as it is, you can't get into the story because the bits are too short and too random, but you can't get into the managing bits either because you're constantly interrupted. So, in the end, this game is a really nice idea and comes with a really interesting premisse but doesn't really manage to capture my heart. I don't see myself finishing it any time soon.

Wciągająca fabuła i wspaniała, nostalgiczna muzyczka

gra jest 90 na 100 bo jest wybitna fabuła i ciekawy gamplay

I wanted to like the game, but every aspect of it has major flaws. Even on heavy sale, I recommend skipping since it isn't worth your time. If you want to know how to cheese the terrible quick time events, look at the end of the review. Good things: Art, music, concept, reasonable voice acting. Everything else is fairly bad. [b]Story[/b] [list] [*] Each chapter cycles in new characters while cycling out ones you saw the previous chapter. So you don't develop a relationship with any of them. [*] Terrible conclusion and explanation. [/list] [b]Coffee management[/b] [list] [*] Repetitive after chapter 2. You unlock more stuff, but it doesn't affect the gameplay. [*] If your warehouse fills up, the Production numbers you set will get lowered. Even if the warehouse will get cleared out the moment you sell product for that week! So basically every week you do following: Sell your product. Go to Production and set production numbers back to what they previously were. This is annoying. [*] They don't tell you that you are limited to only 4 tasks in each column. Anytime you have a contract, you have a task "Manage Contract" that you must assign out. However, if you negotiated for a "Hard" price, you will have a second task of "Premium Services". At a given time you can have up to 3 contracts. So if you negotiate 3 "Hard" deals to maximize profits, you will only have room for 3 "Manage Contract" and 1 "Premium Services." Now, for a given deal, those 2 tasks share their success. So you can dump extra hours into the "Manage Contract" to make up for the fact you aren't putting any hours in the "Premium Services." [*] Ad campaigns are awful. You don't know how much each will increase your sales until after you run it. There are 11 different ones total and you can only run up to 2. So if you want to actually pick the best ad campaigns, you have to run ads for 6 weeks. So right before the end of a week, pick 2 to run, and go to the next week. See how much they affected sales. Then reload your save and repeat 5 more times. Finally, you can go back and pick the proper ads. Another annoying thing is that many of the ad campaigns don't increase sales at all. [*] Managing employees amounts to keeping satisfaction rates above 40% or so. The reason being that at around 30%, the employee won't show up that week. You also won't be able to Fire them. This simply means you do the following: 1) Try to keep hours lower if possible, which reduces how much their satisfaction drops each week. 2) When an employee's satisfaction goes below 40%, bump it back up. There are 3 actions: Encourage, give a one-time bonus, increase salary. You can do each action up to 3 times for a given employee. 3) The option to increase salary doesn't make sense. It boosts satisfaction 104%. That's over 100%, meaning it would mostly be wasted unless the employee was at 0%. But for it to get that low, you would have already had to deal with the employee not showing up. 4) So, if an employee is close to 30% and you don't have anymore Encourage or Bonus ammo left, Fire them and Hire a replacement. A few weeks later, you can rehire them, at which point their ammo resets. Also they retain their training. [/list] [b]Detective-ing[/b] [list] [*] Connecting clues: It often is unclear which 2 clues the game wants you to connect. And you only are allowed 2 mistakes. Luckily, you can pay in-game money to autoconnect clues. So I would just pay money, reload my save, and manually connect them. [*] Dialog options are too often a crapshoot. Again, save+reload [/list] [b]Bugs and annoyances[/b] [list] [*] Dialog trees missing routes or having incorrect options. [*] The game incorrectly says what the maximum possible contract is sometimes. [*] A few achievements seem to be impossible. [list] [*] The Gourmand - I don't think you can ever eat dessert. The dialog talks about icing on a cake... but then you are presented with an option to get a liqueur instead, which skips dessert. [*] Master of Negotiation - There are a few customer conversations where I don't think it's possible to get 95%+ customer attitude. [*] Outstanding move - I got a 100% Perfect contract, and still didn't trigger this. [/list] [*] Lots of misspellings, poor grammar, and missing words. [*] You can skip lines of dialog, but only slowly. You have to wait for the voice line to start before you can go to the next line. [*] You can cheese the quick time events. This is the one good bug! To do this: [spoiler]Press Escape to pause. Keep pausing until dial is in correct spot. Press Spacebar to lock the dial in place.[/spoiler] [/list]

Quite a good story and simple gameplay. Should get it at a discount...

Es hat wirklich sehr viel Spaß gemacht, gemeinsam mit Arthur den verschiedenen Spuren und Hinweisen zu folgen. Ich mochte die Atmosphäre in dem Spiel sehr, genauso wie die Kombination aus Business-Strategie und Detektiv-Arbeit. Wirklich ein kleiner Schatz, den ich für alle cozy Gamer mit Hang zum Düsteren nur empfehlen kann :)

线索推理逻辑连贯，商业谈判和经营部分专业有趣

Leider nicht auf deutsch!

Ocena 6/10 Przyjemna gierka detektywistyczna w której trzeba wspinać po szczeblach kariery właściciela kawiarnii, aby zbadać sprawę tajemniczego morderstwa

A pretty unique mix of detective point & click, combined with business management. Somehow, it works for me. Spent a couple days playing it all the way to the end and farming achievements. Couldn't find guides, so I wrote some. Art and visual style is fantastic, story is interesting if a bit messy in places. It's a bit buggy at times (especially in the staff assignment roster, the coffee production levers, and some of the in-game numbers and achievements), but nothing that outright stops the game in its tracks. Would recommend if you happen to like both genres like I do.