Coffee Noir - Business Detective Game

The investigation seem nice and the game is polished. But the coffee management is not very interesting and out of the box. And you can only deduct 3 times per day for deduction. And the evidence are not really good enough to allow you to understand which connection is a good one. I feel like i'm losing my time playing it, the story seem interesting and all. Two things don't go right in this game : - The connections between evidence are random. Impossible to know what is good one, one is a bad one. - The "good" line to improve contact attitude seem random also. You have no clue to be able to guess what is the good line. Devs put a hard work in this project, it's sad for me to be force to put a bad review. I do not really wish to continue further. It's just not fun.

It's a first impression. I might change my mind latter. If I come back... The writing is similar to the acting : it feels off. The sound mixing feels off too. Music can be just right, or to loud form scene to scene. The voice of the actors can saturate, regularly. The two genre, buisness tycoon and detective work, don't mend well, but like for the rest, I feel it comes from the execution, not the idea. The biggest indicator for that might be the tutorial and detective mechanics : heavy handed, not intuitive, time consuming for little in return. Like for the uchronia obsessed with coffee and the neverdying style of the 20s, it has a charm. But something does not feel right. A sort of uncanny valey, but for design. It could have worked. But [i]something[/i] is off. Some issue for the voice acting. It's competent. But not good. The lines lack coherence and direction. I even noticed some blatant error in the text ("mother" being replaced by "father"), or in the actor direction (a shy person acting confidently). Some people compliment the art, the drawing, and so on, but it's no stranger to issues. Character's hair color can change for no reason, and faces can be difficult to recognize from place to place. I might be wrong (probably in fact, I am a nobody after all), but it feel, look, and sound like a project that lacked coordination or a clear enough vision of what it wanted to do.

This is where steam needs a "neutral" response. Pros: + Solid little detective story. Got plenty of whodunnits and a HUGE cast of characters + Having the premise be a detective disguised as a salesman actually do sales and run a little management company is an interesting twist. Cons: - The management part was too straight forward. Once you knew what you were doing you could ignore a lot of it (marketing, inventory management) and everything just kind of ran itself. - The jump to the next chapter was a huge problem as it would cancel all your contracts so your finances took a big hit and it would take awhile to get up and running again but you would do so in the exact same way every time. - The story felt unsatisfying at the end. There was a lot of plot holes and once you learn "The Twist" a lot of the events don't make a lot of sense anymore. A lot of elaborate loops that are exciting in the lead up but when you look at it from the lens of The Big Bad Evil Guy it's all kind of silly.

Great game, something different. The story line is great and the background music and art create an awesome atmosphere even though it's 2D. I also really enjoyed the combo of a detective story and running a business. The only negative was that there were few English spelling and grammar mistakes in the text, but that didn't spoil the game, especially because the actors actually spoke without any mistakes.

An intriguing noir storyline, mixed with an pretty fun business sim. It's unique, and reommended.

The story is a lot of fun, the voice acting is excellent and the graphics look solid. As a business simulator, it's decent and very simple. The crime-solving is pretty weak. When picking a clue, whether it connects to the correct answer or 3+ alternatives usually feels more like a coinflip than an actual mystery because multiple clues overlap too much. Negotiations are more coin-flipping. E.g. would an aggressive macho approach impress a macho character (e.g. mirroring psychology) or infuriate him? It feels on most negotiation decisions that there's a plausible case for why a particular decision could work in line with the information we have on the target, OR it could not work. Sometimes literally the same approach both works and flops with the same character. We have an artistic Japanese businesswoman who gets both deeply flattered when you make artistic references and also terribly offended by later bringing up a different masterpiece painter. Coinflip. In a better game, I think if you understand the case/characters you should be pretty reliably able to pick out which option will work well vs. rather than feeling it's a total guess most of the time. LA Noire and Phoenix Wright mainly progress through dialogue by identifying contradictions/lies, which I think works a lot better than either the clue-connection in Coffee Noir or guessing what VIPs will respond well to in conversation. Plotting: I don't think the plot holds up at a glance but it's kinda fun on first take. [spoiler] In particular, don't think too hard about who included the "genome" plot device in the paintings, what they hoped to accomplish by doing so, or why nothing seemed to come of this unspecified person(s) having the plot device besides a bonkers noir chase some generations later. The entire purpose of the game IS a bonkers noir chase, don't think about it too hard [/spoiler].

I hope it gets upgraded! I got it for about 30 SAR (8 USD) and had a good time, which I valued at exactly 30 SAR. It's very frustrating that I can't skip scenes that I've already seen, so once you get to the harder negotiations you become stuck clicking-to-move-on-to-the-next-sentence every time a character begins speaking. Annoying! But there is 30 SAR worth of fun in there, I suppose. I probably won't be completing the game because it's too annoying to get back into, but I enjoyed a little 10 hour binge. ... Actually, I may not have enjoyed it if I had had other things to do. Like, it's not good enough to REPLACE an activity but good enough to FILL TIME. If you need to do that. I guess. Sorry you need to do that, man.