Have you ever played Grim Fandango? It is a game where you work in the Grim Reaper’s bureaucracy chain. You get pulled into doing several things to help people get through to the other side, and endure a whole catalog of 90s adventure game logic. If you ask the question, “Does it stand up to the test of time?” I’m sure most would raise their hand a little bit and shake it like they have Parkinson’s. It is fun if you can get past some of the 90s shaped bugs.

Necrobarista is what would happen if Manny was a hipster running a café in Melbourne, that let the recently departed investigate their death before moving on. Though, unlike the aforementioned Grim Fandango, there is a bit less of that conventional gameplay we are all too comfortable talking about when it comes to video games. You (for lack of a better term) play as Maddy, a woman that runs the front-of-house and now runs this café for the living and the dead. You are the first face the newly dead on their travels into whatever comes next. Whether that involves sitting in a cloud for eternity in the most boring existence, partying with Dave Grohl and the D, or rotting in the ground as bugs slowly eat your mangled remains is up to your beliefs I wager.

You follow Maddy and her band of hipster friends, confidants, clients, and whatever Chay is. I’ll return to that in a second, but for the most part, the game is a visual novel, though it’s not about some teenage Japanese women slowly dying in a creepy an unsettling groundhog-day style mystery. Breaking convention in a different way, the visual novel aspect is done through typical cutscenes or movie-style camera shots and editing. It makes for a much more interesting look to the game, than say any other supernatural visual novel you could pick from.

This is important. Your eye never dulls to the background, character design, or UI. The entire lack of UI is another interesting point, asking you just to click or hammer the spacebar intermittently with every line you’ve read. This is where I’m sure someone would expect me to bring up Dyslexia and finding these types of games to be monotonous. In fact, the break up of visuals and the few options to differentiate the text from its background makes it far easier than some subtitled movies or games. What would trip me up more often than not was odd usage of the language here and there.

Back to Chay, most characters have an anime sheen to their faces. It comes with the anime-style art of characters against a much darker and “realistic,” for want of a better term, looking background. With the art style, everyone looks about 12-18-years old, so I’m somewhat pulled out of the reality when Maddy looks like she’s hardly 20. Yet, she’s talking about working for 4-years in the café, being saddled with more responsibility than she can handle, and somewhat adopting Ashley, the kid of the group. I have no idea what Chay is. At one point it was referenced that he’s meant to be old, but old to Maddy is 30+. Nonetheless, he’s immortal and over 200-years-old. 

I won’t spoil any more of the story, though I will say I like Ashley. As I sip away at another cup of coffee in my morning routine, I see myself reflected in her. As a story, I don’t hate it. I do have gripes, such as the rather childish/hipster usage of language that 20-somethings use on the internet. That is mostly because I just do not understand it. Though those gripes are rather minor personal ones, it moves along nicely with the previously mentioned 3D shots keeping the world alive visually.

What I do not enjoy at all is the rather superficial options. The main menu is a particular grievance that proves a bit of a point, lagging and having major issues with audio. I could see some not bothering to play if they are having issues there. The graphical options don’t really help, as they seem to do very little. This along with a “windowed mode” that won’t let you resize said window, makes it so you might as well play full screen. That is slightly annoying if you have two or three monitors, and you can’t select which one the game displays on.

The performance in-game is fine on recommended hardware and something a little bit below. However, the windowed mode does stick out to me. It is not a deal-breaker, of course, but it would be nice to at the very least, change the monitor the game is running on. I don’t know why this sticks in my head, but it seems like a secondary thought with anything else you would play.

In summation: I think Necrobarista is a brilliant little piece of artistic, hipster visual novel nonsense wrapped in supernatural mystery. It neither goes off the deep end with a compilation of reasons to hate hipsters, nor does it try to justify its supernatural elements with complex ways of making it grounded. It is part of the world so characters don’t gawk at it, too much. I don’t think Necrobarista is perfect, though I do believe it is a good step against rather dull visual novels that would do better as fan-fiction. There is, at the very least, a reason to have visuals that don’t just titanically titillating trollops in skimpy clothes.

A PC copy of Necrobarista was provided by Route 59 for this review.

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Necrobarista

$19.99

7

Score

7.0/10

Pros

• A gorgeous anime art style.
• Characters that I want to be around for a while.
• Interesting enough story to keep you in the world.

Cons

• Options leave much to be desired.