Robot bartender visual novel9/2/2023 Sei: A peacekeeping soldier with a delightful outlook on life.A cavalry of interesting characters barrels in and out of the bar on the daily, including but not limited to: Yes, Jill has her own devastating arc, and a greater world-tale revolving around a weak government, robot/human interactions and an ultra-powerful corporation exists, but those things largely exist to service the stories of our customers and friends. … is actually less about the protagonist or the world as it is about the lives of her customers. Other than that, gameplay elements are at a minimum, which is fine because the system here lives to serve the story.īeautiful character art highlights a workmanlike, tight interface. Additionally, players paying attention can learn a bit about the customers based on what style of drink they tend to prefer. One might ask why such a simple mechanic exists at all, and I would answer that mixing a drink here and there provides a welcome breather between dialogs, allowing the conversation to sink into the player’s mind for a bit and break up the tedium of too much reading. It’s a nice little database that puts instructions right in front of you, and even if you mis-click and put in the wrong ingredient, you can always reset without penalty up until you serve the drink. When it’s time to make the drinks, the bartender’s menu pops up and the player can search for drinks in a number of ways: by name, flavor, style and so forth. I would’ve liked a ‘quit to desktop’ option.Ī selection of 24 mixed drinks is available, all made from the same five basic ingredients with options of aging or ice, mixed or blended. It only takes a few extra seconds, but quitting the game in fullscreen is kind of a pain in the ass. Regarding the interface, I have only small nitpick: The quit button takes you, not to the desktop or to the title screen, but to the publisher/developer credits. These events, while easy to avoid as the apartment segment of the game pops up a notification telling you exactly what to buy, provide a touch more challenge by replacing Jill’s hint with some internal-monologue musing about things she shouldn’t have bought or her current situation. Unless she’s distracted, a side effect of failing to purchase some miscellaneous item or meet a bill payment during the month. Mixing drinks is 99 percent of the gameplay involved in Valhalla, and messing it up is far more difficult than getting it right as Jill tends to give the player a hint about what the customer asked for when the mixing menu pops up. The apartment offers some housekeeping/worldbuilding options, and sets a few hints in front of the player that can only be missed if the player tries, like, super duper hard, y’allĪt work, customers appear one after another and make drink requests between bouts of well-characterized banter. There are only a few game screens present in Valhalla, the primary being a Shadowgate-like view port from behind the bar and the secondary being a more artistically-simplistic view of Jill’s apartment where we can catch up with the news on her phone or purchase items for the apartment or, once in a while, use at the bar. I’m not kidding when I say this game had me on the edge of tears here and there. We mix drinks and change lives, and in so doing we experience some of the most beautiful, personal stories outside 40-hour RPGs. Ours is the role of Jill, a 27-year-old bartender at a hole-in-the-wall bar called Valhalla, a woman of simultaneously sophomoric humor and acidic observation, and our goal is nearly Pong-levels of simple. Our story takes place in a future timeline that, thankfully, avoids the worn-out post-apocalyptic Dystopian setting so thoroughly bastardized by The Hunger Games and its clones. While VA-11 Hall-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action (hereafter referred to as Valhalla) isn’t without its share of these tropes, there’s a depth of soul and character present here that defies the standard boundaries of the style. So often, the stories weigh heavy with anime cliches, painful author-insertion fantasies and thoughtless fourth-wall breaks. Visual novels, for me, largely fly beneath the radar. Buy it if you’re cool with lots of reading. The message above the splash screen gives a fair idea of what we’re in for.
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