Kabaret

Played this game, found the art style and setting quite compelling as a someone who is born and grew up in Southeast Asia myself. However the story had a weird vibe and does not compel me to return to the game after a few hours of play. Decided to leave a review though in recent light of allegations of sexual harassment from the studio. As someone who had worked in game dev myself, this is a shame. I personally cannot recommend this game to anyone, do not support dev studios who turn a blind eye to sexual harassment.

[i]Kabaret[/i] is perhaps best described as a dark and grotesque version of [i]Coffee Talk[/i]. It’s a relaxing yet disturbing visual novel in which your main character will act as a tea master for a community of supernatural beings (monsters or ghosts), engage in entertaining conversations with them to learn their thoughts and needs, and then craft through a minigame a suitable tea to ease their sorrows or uplift their moods. The game is told from the perspective of Jebat, a young delivery guy, who becomes a serpent-like monster after being killed by a mythical entity with the shape of a winged man. The first chapter of the game narrates the series of tragic events that Jebat goes through during his last day before his transformation, gradually building up a state of intense psychological tension. Starting with Jebat questioning the meaning of society and his place in it, continuing with his mother’s suicide which triggers him to run away from dealing with the feeling of loss and despair at the sight of her corpse, and ending with his choice of not saving another human being because of his disbelief in the value of life, the narrative is simply daunting and stirring. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2985733787 The winged man’s punishment comes on the apex of all these circumstances, and Jebat suddenly wakes up in the body of a serpent-monster on his way to a place called Kabaret, also known as a sanctuary for all kinds of non-human beings: mythical monsters, as well as ghosts and other entities. The rest of the game will have Jebat interact with the other dwellers, slowly getting to know them and preparing teas for them. On the background of all this, there’s a political plot revolving around the upcoming elections for the future leader of Kabaret, but it serves only as a context for the hard life choices that the writers throw at you revolving around who you let live and who you let die, who you sacrifice and for what kind of purpose, etc. Different characters will support different candidates, and the choices you make will gain you friends or allies for that candidate. Ultimately though, the story is about Jebat awakening his innate potential and rising above the conflict between his two opposing sides: his humanity which prompts him to be compassionate, and his rough monstrous instincts. Just like in [i]Coffee Talk[/i], the game has an overall chill ambiance, but the bizarre interactions, the twisted narrative and the distorted events that you will get to experience make this game not suitable for sensitive audiences. It contains depictions of a hanged person, dead animals, dismemberment, cruelty against infants and other unsettling elements that can have an emotional impact on someone’s well-being, even though they are not the main focus of the story and appear only sometimes. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2985734400 While there are several minigames that you will get to experience during your gameplay (some of them seemingly being popular in Asia), the most often encountered one is the tea ceremony for preparing tea according to the dweller’s requests. This consists in picking the correct three ingredients (one of each type: leaf, liquid, spice) from the ones that the minigame spawns. Identifying what kind of tea you are required to prepare is done by following the indications about what combination of ingredients is used for each tea and what its effects are (available in your journal), combined with what you previously discussed with that respective dweller. In practice though, what the dwellers want and what they actually need are two different things, thus you are required to read between the lines to pick the right tea. Unfortunately for me, this whole process was most of the time not very intuitive, leading to the majority of tea decisions being incorrect. The dwellers also have certain preferred ingredients and others that they dislike but it’s not entirely explained what the consequences of using a hated ingredient (despite it being seemingly needed) are. There is no feedback about the correctness of your choices during the preparation phase, and the tea type that you were expected to prepare is revealed only at the end of the sequence. Sadly, there’s no way to go back and prepare another tea to fix your mistake. In terms of design, [i]Kabaret[/i] is not your typical visual novel. It’s pretty interactive, letting you choose in which order you talk to the characters available for that stage, plus you’ll have to go through around 10 minigames that can’t be skipped even in subsequent playthroughs. It’s also not the kind of visual novel in which you pick a route and then sit back and relax simply because… the routes are not very well defined. There’s an enormous amount of choices, spread over all chapters, and a lot of the earlier choices affect the way the ending unfolds. Rather than working based on a route system, these choices seem to use a stat-building system, in which points are allocated to one candidate or another based on what you pick during a choice. Their immediate outcome is not evident, and more often than not, the replies from the dwellers are the same (or differ only through one word / one line) for all options. Likely because of its interactive design, [i]Kabaret[/i] doesn’t use one of the common VN engines. Instead, it’s built using Unity, which comes with a few nice features (for example, you can mouseover a highlighted term in the text to see its definition) but also with a lot of downsides too: the lack of a manual save feature, no option to auto read text or skip already read text. The game autosaves at certain checkpoints, but these are not placed often enough to explore the different outcomes of a choice. Reloading usually puts you several choices / minigames back, making you replay even 30-60 mins. Not being able to skip the text, the minigames, or the cutscenes makes you waste a tremendous amount of time to get back to the point you were previously at and perhaps attempt a different choice or tea combination. Also, there is no history of the text you read, therefore you can’t go back to read a line that you might have missed. Perhaps equally annoying is that the tea ceremony (which occurs very often in the game) has some extremely slow animations. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2985733893 The fact that the game has many mutually-exclusive achievements and seven different endings already indicates that the player is expected to do multiple playthroughs. However, without manual saves or clear routes, and without writing down your choices to keep track of them, you have a pretty big chance of spending 10h on a playthrough only to reach an ending that you’ve already seen before. Essentially, [i]Kabaret[/i] is the type of game that you can either play once for the fun of it and reach one ending, or strictly follow a guide if you want to explore everything it offers. Even though sometimes the characters are not very consistent, the narrative is overall good and entertaining. There are no voice-overs aside from some guttural sounds that the monsters make (which at times can become a bit annoying due to their constant repetition), but the game features some great songs. Also memorable are the beautiful visuals and the overall character design based on mythical creatures of South Asia, which give the game a lot of flavor. Despite its shortcomings, [i]Kabaret[/i] is overall a good game, with a very peculiar vibe. It’s a worthwhile journey into Asian myths and folklore, yet one that I’d recommended only to those strong enough to digest really dark and disturbing writing. [quote]💜 If you like this review, please consider following [url=http://store.steampowered.com/curator/11354094]Lilly's Corner Curator page[/url] 🌸 [url=https://lillycorner.com/]Website[/url] [/quote]

Back when I was a preteen (ca. 15 years ago), visual novel games already had functions for skipping, returning, making several saves, and auto-reading. This game lacks all of these mechanics. No big deal, at least the story is good, right? Right, yeah, no. There is little depth to the story, and it is difficult to get attached to the characters; your choices matter little as well. What I absolutely loved is the art style, but really, I would have rather bought some pretty print to hang on my wall than this game.

At this point, I've played and seen both endings (pro and anti) for Garuda and Caretaker. Sadly, this game lacks of VN thingy; no skip dialogue, no manual save, no fast-forward or auto button too 😅 penat klik satu satu. Autosave is not enough for me to explore the game casually. Hence, replayability is almost none for me (but hey, I managed to finish my 2nd playthrough!) I do enjoyed the stories in early chapters but there are plotholes here and there towards the ending. What makes me okay with the game is the visual, very stunning and beautiful. And their theme songs, waloweh~ they are great too! But, that's all this game can offer. So, maybe I'm 50-50 on recommending this game to others. If you still want to play Kabaret casually, just take the risk 😉 Update: Started my 3rd playthru to see Minister's endings, gave up halfway sebab penat 😅 aaaa sorry!

Not gonna lie, I love the whole Art styles. Although I received this game as a gift, I won't sugarcoat. Mediocre and poorly storytelling. I don't know where the plot carries even at chapter One. Feels like college students trying to hustle before deadlines. Also it's tedious I have to spam spacebar cuz there's no skip button? no save button? Low Budget V.A. Ridiculously expensive so get the game during SALE (if you like the kinky just because)

Another gem from Southeast Asia. Great artwork, music and game design. The story starts a bit dark, and it takes some time to warm up. The Tea Making part kinda resembles Coffee Talk, although still different. You got to make teas from any kind of ingredients found in Southeast Asia. How cool is that. Things that can be improved: 1. The responsiveness of the mouse. It takes some time to get used to the fact that you have to click on a specific space to move forward. Like, a really specific place of the teapot (for instance). I'm using a PC. 2. The ability to save manually. So we don't have load from the latest checkpoint when continuing the game. Or at least auto save whenever we just finished a dialogue scene would have been great. If functionality is important to you, get this game when on sale (unless they have fixed the above issues). If artwork and music alone or if you want to support local games, get it regardless.

Won this game in a twitter giveaway from the devs. So far i've enjoyed it, the game offers pretty asian art style and music that fits very well. It is a rather dark graphic novel where you get to select your choices as well as perform minigames. You learn about various ingame characters (monsters) as you make tea for them - a pretty interesting way to interact with the game but unfortunately it felt a bit tedious as there seem to be a problem with clicking on items and not having it register. I would recommend getting it on a heavy discount rather than paying the full price due to the issues players currently face in the game, such as no skipping cutscenes or dialogue, the mouse seems less responsive in certain parts (when making tea for monsters, gotta spam click everything on the screen to make it register). I also dont recommend tabbing out during tea making ceremony with the notebook open, when i tabbed back in the notebook was stuck open on the screen and i had to blindly click around to try and get the tea cooking. I havent finished the game yet however for those who do enjoy visual novels and pretty artstyle, they will surely enjoy this asian themed game.

---{ Graphics }--- ☐ You forget what reality is ☑ Beautiful ☐ Good ☐ Decent ☐ Bad ☐ Don‘t look too long at it ☐ MS-DOS ---{ Gameplay }--- ☐ Very good ☑ Good ☐ It's just gameplay ☐ Mehh ☐ Watch paint dry instead ☐ Just don't ---{ Audio }--- ☑ Eargasm ☐ Very good ☐ Good ☐ Not too bad ☐ Bad ☐ I'm now deaf ---{ Audience }--- ☑ Kids ☑ Teens ☑ Adults ☑ Grandma ---{ PC Requirements }--- ☐ Check if you can run paint ☑ Potato ☐ Decent ☐ Fast ☐ Rich boi ☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer ---{ Difficulty }--- ☑ Just press 'W' ☐ Easy ☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master ☐ Significant brain usage ☐ Difficult ☐ Dark Souls ---{ Grind }--- ☑ Nothing to grind ☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks ☐ Isn't necessary to progress ☐ Average grind level ☐ Too much grind ☐ You'll need a second life for grinding ---{ Story }--- ☐ No Story ☐ Some lore ☐ Average ☐ Good ☑ Lovely ☐ It'll replace your life ---{ Game Time }--- ☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee ☐ Short ☑ Average ☐ Long ☐ To infinity and beyond ---{ Price }--- ☐ It's free! ☑ Worth the price ☐ If it's on sale ☐ If u have some spare money left ☐ Not recommended ☐ You could also just burn your money ---{ Bugs }--- ☐ Never heard of ☑ Minor bugs ☐ Can get annoying ☐ ARK: Survival Evolved ☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs ---{ ? / 10 }--- ☐ 1 ☐ 2 ☐ 3 ☐ 4 ☐ 5 ☐ 6 ☐ 7 ☑ 8 ☐ 9 ☐ 10

This is going to have to go thumbs down because the question is whether I could recommend this game and I wouldn't. That doesn't mean it wasn't a beautiful piece of art in may ways... Pros: + Gorgeous style. Loved the artwork of the characters. The interpretations of the minor monsters mentioned after reading what they were, very fun. + The atmosphere and music of the Kabaret itself is mysterious and intriguing and had nice areas. + And I do like a dark VN. I love the obvious danger to the scenario for the main character. If your decisions mattered more this would've been a great place for further consequences... maybe even routes to character death? Still, I liked the ones he faced. + Please more south asian folklore cause yes. I recognized a few creatures, met a few new ones I liked. + Loved this style of implementing Malaysian words. I've seen other small studios try and fail with this but the hover-text and dictionary was a clever way to do this. + Fun mini games. + While I had issues with events/saving, the pacing was steady and dialogue not too overwhelming. + Some very intriguing story scenarios informing the plot. Cons: + I need not mention what others have on manual save points and other missing VN mechanics. This could've been minor, but stands out with the other cons. + Not sure the point of pacifist and slyness routes when you approach some scenes with blunt violence and humiliation anyway. + Wish the effort to get perfect game scores or receive items was more rewarding than a few extra lines in a scene. + Plot holes and unexplained intrigues. Also easy to accidentally convince people to leave. + I liked the character ideas, but they often show little depth. Female friend characters are just there to flirt with /spoiler [spoiler] and then all get murdered which felt shallow.[/spoiler] Some of the most interesting friends, you hear their story and then barely speak again. + I wish some of the filler dialogue (with filler NPCS) was optional. Being forced to talk to everyone to progress was a chore, particularly when a lot of NPCs told you nothing of interest or inform. This got real bumpy near the end without the minigames to break things up. + I didn't like the opening... I like an unsettling story but it didn't serve a point. It just felt bad/heavy to witness. [spoiler]With yet another dead woman.[/spoiler] + You have to follow a main character who is hard to connect with. His 'bad personality' in the opening made it hard to care for his fate. And while he changes a little to suit his circumstances he doesn't grow. He was self-concerned and lacking focus. It's frustrating since this game has all the right tools and ideas for a really good ride and kinda crashes and burns in its execution. Adding in the alleged studio harassment (sadly common in game studios) this just doesn't seem the game worth trying. I definitely hope to see more games like it though.

can not recommend playing this game. aside from the artstyle this game provides little to nothing to keep me playing for more than a few hours. also do we really need to mention so many times about how handsome the MC is lol ? almost feels like a self insert from the dev oh and speaking of devs.... yea no, will no longer be supporting this studio