"Coffee Talk 2": First Impressions

It's a clear sign that I'm getting soft in my old age (or, rather, my thirties) that Opinions Can Be Wrong has become a place where I'm not using my increasingly infrequent posts ranting about how my favourite childhood TV shows have been revived badly or how stupid people on the internet are and am instead waxing sentimental about characters in an Indonesian visual novel. Coffee Talk, by Toge Productions, which released in 2020 and which I played in early 2021, is one of my favourite games of the last couple of years. That's probably for two reasons; one was that it was a game about going out and meeting people that I, like lot of people, first played during the isolation periods of the Covid-19 pandemic. The other is probably that a number of the characters were regulars, and one was a writer who came to the titular coffee shop to write fiction, just like I used to when I was a regular at a Sydney bar that closed when the pandemic began. Coffee Talk is a visual novel about making drinks for the customers in an urban fantasy Seattle that come to your late-night café, chatting to them and listening as they chat to each other. You have no control over what your character says: this isn't an adventure game or an RPG. You only have control over what drinks you serve them. Serve the right drinks and you might make their lives a little better and make it easier for them to communicate with each other. Throw in pleasing pixel art, ear-catching lo-fi music and a generally relaxing tone and, while the writing occasionally came across as a little naïve, the atmosphere was practically perfect for what it was trying to be.

 

It felt natural that there should be a sequel to Coffee Talk. It's the kind of premise that could be continued more or less indefinitely, with characters coming and going. I think for a long time there'll be places where people looking for good drinks and good conversation will go to spend a little while. Thus it wasn't too much of a surprise when Toge announced in mid-2021 that the game would have a sequel. Since then I was waiting patiently but with fairly constant anticipation, as the game was delayed from a 2022 release to 2023 and the Indonesian game development scene was shaken by the untimely death of Mohammad Fahmi, the first game's creator. I played the Coffee Talk 2 demo when it came out, searched in vain for whether anyone had uploaded the trailer and demo's lo-fi rendition of a classic Erik Satie piece anywhere, and wishlisted the game when its "Coming Soon" page went up on Steam. When the day finally arrived, after initially thinking "I'm not sure I'm actually excited", I found myself counting down the hours for it to release.

So far I'm four hours into Coffee Talk Episode 2: Hibiscus and Butterfly, and I think I'm about halfway through the game. However, I don't want to wait until I've finished the game to get some thoughts down, and I don't want to rush through it. One thing I noticed fairly early on is that while the visuals are still of the same style, and the music is by the same artist, and still excellent, something felt a little different. Coffee Talk 2 doesn't have the same writing team as the first game; this is, apparently, unrelated to the passing of the original creator, who from what I've read had not been closely involved in the sequel's development. While many of the characters' voices are brought over very well, and largely feel like an evolution of who they were before, it does feel different. The barista player character, in particular, feels a lot more bubbly and a lot less uptight than in the first game, and there's a rather more frequent use of exclamation marks in the dialogue which, for a game without voice acting, rather affects the tone.

This, as it turns out, isn't a bad thing. I have to admit that there was a point on one of the game's early days, the third I think, in which the game came close to losing me, when it was focused on the new character Amanda, the extraterrestrial sibling of the fan-favourite alien character Neil from the first game, who now calls himself Silver. This almost seemed too much like fan fiction of the first game to me, too much of a "wouldn't it be funny if this happened next." However, the game quickly won me back when on the next day it drew a little attention to the slight change in the characters' voices, intentionally or otherwise, and generally I think it feels as if the characters' continuation makes sense from where they were at the end of the first game, and that the new writers cared about the first game's characters (if, sometimes, a little too much, throwing in a few too many nods to continuity).

 

The one thing that really stands out is the absence of Freya, the main regular from the first game, who is said at the start of this sequel to be out of town. Freya was by far my favourite character in the first game, probably because she reminded me a bit of myself. I know from the trailers that she shows up at some point (I'm guessing she'll come back from her trip on the final day), and she's still the first character to appear when you start up "Endless Mode" to experiment with making drinks, so I recognise her absence, as conspicuous as it is, to be an intentional device, and one that was probably necessary to give this game a bit of a different feeling. As such, ultimately I think this was an effective choice on the part of the writers. Freya was such a major presence in the first game that she almost had to be moved to the peripheries here in order to create space for some new stories. In this regard, however, it's worth noting that the game will probably make a lot more sense to people who have played the first game, as almost every character from the original shows up in the sequel and there are actually only a few new faces.

So far I think Coffee Talk 2 is a decent sequel. By its nature it can't be as fresh as the first, and at times the writing isn't always entirely a natural continuation of the original game, but it's doing a pretty good job so far. Back in 2021 I tried to write a review of the first game that I never published because I felt like I was unable to say anything that other reviews hadn't already said. Perhaps after this I'll see if it's worth doing any kind of holistic retrospective on the two games and the general idea of a sequel written by new authors. In the meantime, I think I have a good few hours of Coffee Talk 2 to go, and I have to say if anything it's just nice where I don't feel like I have to force myself to pace myself but nor do I feel unmotivated to play a little more each day. So far it's all pouring out quite smoothly.