Coffee Noir - Business Detective Game

I'm giving this game a thumbs down because I cannot recommend other people spend money on it. That said, I'd like to see another game developed by the same people. But it certainly isn't worth the price of $25. That said, it has a free demo, so give it a shot if it sounds like your type of thing! I like the core idea and the setting but the gameplay itself quickly becomes routine and monotonous. Both the business sim and the detective side of things seriously lack depth and it's disappointing that they really don't intersect. For instance, every chapter you'll meet with 3 people under the pretense of setting up a coffee contract with their company. You do negotiate a contact, but you're also trying to get information out of them related to the case you've been hired to solve. Pretty much all the information you get come from a post-meeting cutscene--not any of the dialogue gameplay. What's worse is that as soon as the chapter ends the three contacts you've established are immediately null and void. Am I running a business or not? Why does none of this matter anymore, especially since the negotiation mechanics encourage you to get the best possible deal down to one one-hundreth of a percent? It would have been far more interesting if story choices you made further along could alienate these people and threaten your business relationships with them--anything really that got the business sim and the detective stuff to intersect. The length of the game is padded by boring optional objectives you can continue to do for several weeks before advancing the chapter. There is no tangible reward for doing these things (save for completing ALL of them across ALL chapters) and it just becomes tedious. Then again, if you rush through the main story, you'll find that the game is over in the blink of an eye. Narratively speaking the story worked well enough, though the ending feels unearned and I wish you could actually do more to impact the outcome of things. I don't dislike this game the way the above notes might suggest. I can easily imagine a version of this game I'd adore, given that I love noir detective fiction and think combining that with a business sim is a really interesting idea. The execution just isn't there. As I said, I'd be curious to see another game from the people behind Coffee Noir, but whether it was due to limitation in budget, time, or other factors, I didn't love this game the way I was hoping I would. If it sounds like your type of thing, buy it on sale for $10 or less.

线索推理逻辑连贯，商业谈判和经营部分专业有趣

Overall: The game has some neat elements and some very likable aspects. The story IS curious and it's kinda fun just going through the motions for a while. As long as you understand up front that you're not really playing a detective GAME...or a business management GAME....that you're mostly just engaging in an interactive story, it's actually pretty okay :) I hit a couple of glitches here and there, but nothing game breaking. Translations are a bit off at times, but not terribly so. Music is nice but with limited tracks on repeat, gets old quickly. That said. This is neither a very in depth mystery detective game OR a business management game. ...just a story which is almost impossible not to uncover and some gimmicks to make it interactive. If that's NOT what you're looking for....then this game isn't for you. The art and overall feeling is nice. With few exceptions, I think the interface works rather well! the music got old quickly. Within my first hour playing I muted it and just put on some generic Detective Noir music from Youtube instead. The story's not bad. I don't feel invested enough with it to finish the game, but I have enjoyed the story and characters so far. As far as the Detective aspect goes...there is no skill involved in talking with people. No matter how the conversation goes, you're going to get the information you need to continue. After some conversations, a comic book style bit of narrative will pop up and it's a nice bit of story...but doesn't always seem to fit with the discussion/experience you just had. The only actual "detective" work you do is combining clues in what feels like a VERY arbitrary way. If you don't figure out all of the connections before running out of time for the chapter, you can literally just save/load your game repeatedly to brute force your way through it OR buy the solutions with money from your business. ...speaking of Business....when it comes to negotiating contracts, managing your employees and inventory....there's very, very little you actually DO. Unless you're just very unlucky or VERY bad with your resource management you'll never run out of money. Not in the first half of the game, at least. Don't know if later chapters pull a fast one on you at some point. There are very few options for doing anything outside of just ordering product and shipping it to your contracted clients for pre-arranged prices. Negotiating the contracts is fun, but also just an exercise of navigating pre-set trees of conversation with no clear idea where they'll lead. There are also times where you'll have literally just conceded to giving the client something like an 11% discount, do some bantering without even trying to get a better price and the other person just magically asks for a 4% discount instead (giving you a much better deal for no reason). You don't pick the negotiation numbers at any point. While you can do some guesswork based on what you know about the client, you literally have no way of knowing for sure which responses will navigate you to the best outcome without retrying the conversation a few times. Aside from the initial price you offer (which has no further bearing on anything for negotiating) you have ZERO actual control over your counter-offers outside of pre-set conversation choices...some of which don't even TELL you that you're about to offer the client a lower price until after you picked them. Something neat which I liked: when negotiating, many times the negotiation tactic being used is actually labeled as part of your response. In your office is a tablet where you can read up on different tactics. You don't NEED to know any of this at any point. But from a nerd level, I severely appreciated it. Employee management is simple. ...almost too simple. You may find out the hard way that you can only have 4 of a given task-type on your job board, even though there are 5 envelopes. ....the 5th envelope is just there for the game to put stuff in that "you don't have room to schedule on the board." This ultimately means that you can't send all 5 employees to get additional job training at the same time. ...or you are LITERALLY LIMITED IN HOW MUCH YOU CAN CHARGE FOR COFFEE. ...yup. If you negotiate a price which is too high, your client now requires an additional job slot on the board for "Premium services." Doing this with two clients ties up ALL of your job slots for managing accounts, even if you have employees with extra working hours available to manage ALL accounts just fine. (I had to restart the 2nd chapter because I learned the hard way after realizing that I just signed a contract with a third client and then couldn't assign an employee to their account). After you've finished all of the story components for a chapter, there's literally nothing else to do. You're not *really* running a business, so you're just going through the basic motions of keeping some numbers balanced from week to week. There's no more story to pursue until you connect all of the clues and move on to the next chapter. I found myself doing the equivalent of grinding for XP...just running out the clock to earn as much money as I could with my given setup before moving on. Neat idea with lots of potential. Not much of a 'game' though. Just know what you're getting and manage your expectations before picking this one up.

Very good game overall, chapeau bas! I played the game with my wife on TV after more or less figuring out how to do company management. One of the strongest points of the game is the investigation and the story, although it's very much aided by fitting visuals and really great soundtrack. The story is convoluted and satisfying to discover (although connecting clues is not well executed but you can skip it) with a really strong finale. We didn't mind the management part: it's rather on the simple side and probably not for min-maxers (it's hard not to overwork employees when you sign all contracts with high prices). If like me you'd like to focus on the story, I can give a tip on the management part: yes, you will need some money for the story, but no need to go hoarding like a dragon and then worry about employees' motivation, while making the game longer and less enjoyable. I suggest hiring full set of employees in the first chapter (ignore the ones with project management), training them to the max, spending whole chapter 1 all weeks making money, then starting chapter 2 maybe take 2 easy contracts and maybe 1 (rest very easy), enough to get you to 200k, maybe 300k to be safer, and then you can stop worrying about money and employees and you can take all contracts very easy (just to cover costs). Then you can breeze through the story without stopping and without prolonging chapters.

Quite a good story and simple gameplay. Should get it at a discount...

I wanted to like the game, but every aspect of it has major flaws. Even on heavy sale, I recommend skipping since it isn't worth your time. If you want to know how to cheese the terrible quick time events, look at the end of the review. Good things: Art, music, concept, reasonable voice acting. Everything else is fairly bad. [b]Story[/b] [list] [*] Each chapter cycles in new characters while cycling out ones you saw the previous chapter. So you don't develop a relationship with any of them. [*] Terrible conclusion and explanation. [/list] [b]Coffee management[/b] [list] [*] Repetitive after chapter 2. You unlock more stuff, but it doesn't affect the gameplay. [*] If your warehouse fills up, the Production numbers you set will get lowered. Even if the warehouse will get cleared out the moment you sell product for that week! So basically every week you do following: Sell your product. Go to Production and set production numbers back to what they previously were. This is annoying. [*] They don't tell you that you are limited to only 4 tasks in each column. Anytime you have a contract, you have a task "Manage Contract" that you must assign out. However, if you negotiated for a "Hard" price, you will have a second task of "Premium Services". At a given time you can have up to 3 contracts. So if you negotiate 3 "Hard" deals to maximize profits, you will only have room for 3 "Manage Contract" and 1 "Premium Services." Now, for a given deal, those 2 tasks share their success. So you can dump extra hours into the "Manage Contract" to make up for the fact you aren't putting any hours in the "Premium Services." [*] Ad campaigns are awful. You don't know how much each will increase your sales until after you run it. There are 11 different ones total and you can only run up to 2. So if you want to actually pick the best ad campaigns, you have to run ads for 6 weeks. So right before the end of a week, pick 2 to run, and go to the next week. See how much they affected sales. Then reload your save and repeat 5 more times. Finally, you can go back and pick the proper ads. Another annoying thing is that many of the ad campaigns don't increase sales at all. [*] Managing employees amounts to keeping satisfaction rates above 40% or so. The reason being that at around 30%, the employee won't show up that week. You also won't be able to Fire them. This simply means you do the following: 1) Try to keep hours lower if possible, which reduces how much their satisfaction drops each week. 2) When an employee's satisfaction goes below 40%, bump it back up. There are 3 actions: Encourage, give a one-time bonus, increase salary. You can do each action up to 3 times for a given employee. 3) The option to increase salary doesn't make sense. It boosts satisfaction 104%. That's over 100%, meaning it would mostly be wasted unless the employee was at 0%. But for it to get that low, you would have already had to deal with the employee not showing up. 4) So, if an employee is close to 30% and you don't have anymore Encourage or Bonus ammo left, Fire them and Hire a replacement. A few weeks later, you can rehire them, at which point their ammo resets. Also they retain their training. [/list] [b]Detective-ing[/b] [list] [*] Connecting clues: It often is unclear which 2 clues the game wants you to connect. And you only are allowed 2 mistakes. Luckily, you can pay in-game money to autoconnect clues. So I would just pay money, reload my save, and manually connect them. [*] Dialog options are too often a crapshoot. Again, save+reload [/list] [b]Bugs and annoyances[/b] [list] [*] Dialog trees missing routes or having incorrect options. [*] The game incorrectly says what the maximum possible contract is sometimes. [*] A few achievements seem to be impossible. [list] [*] The Gourmand - I don't think you can ever eat dessert. The dialog talks about icing on a cake... but then you are presented with an option to get a liqueur instead, which skips dessert. [*] Master of Negotiation - There are a few customer conversations where I don't think it's possible to get 95%+ customer attitude. [*] Outstanding move - I got a 100% Perfect contract, and still didn't trigger this. [/list] [*] Lots of misspellings, poor grammar, and missing words. [*] You can skip lines of dialog, but only slowly. You have to wait for the voice line to start before you can go to the next line. [*] You can cheese the quick time events. This is the one good bug! To do this: [spoiler]Press Escape to pause. Keep pausing until dial is in correct spot. Press Spacebar to lock the dial in place.[/spoiler] [/list]

Wciągająca fabuła i wspaniała, nostalgiczna muzyczka

gra jest 90 na 100 bo jest wybitna fabuła i ciekawy gamplay