Grimm & Tonic: Aperitif

might be fun, but was not for me

meh tbh

Grimm & Tonic: Aperitif is an extremely short visual novel with very basic writing and almost no real gameplay. Making drinks amounts to flipping through a book and selecting the recipe the game either heavily hints at or outright tells you. The experience is also riddled with issues. I had a loading icon stuck on-screen for all of episode one, and at the end of episode two the character Death remained awkwardly plastered over the final slides. I didn’t bother starting episode three, since the game forces unskippable end credits after every episode and didn’t return me to the hub menu afterward. For $5, this is wildly overpriced. Between the lack of substance, technical problems, and very short runtime, it’s hard to recommend.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDM-CI0U5Jc This is me playing the first episode that's available. Honestly, I don't know if its worth the asking price right now, however I greatly enjoyed the first episode. There's quite a lot of charm in the game and I most definitely want to learn more.

I LIKE IT! I hate visual novels so this definitely surprised me to be done so fun and easy and yet challenging!

Grimm & Tonic is a visual novel with a mild element of "detective" gameplay where you read the story of an individual who died and then has to make drinks for other dead people. The conversations give you clues as to which drinks to make, if you get it wrong you have to re-read the chapter. Yawn. This is mostly a visual novel, AKA a book, only worse because instead of turning pages after several paragraphs you have to click through every single sentence. That's right, shovelware game developers managed to make reading into a complete manual chore. Now, as a developer, if your game plan is to ask money for a paid product which is aimed to compete with free public libraries, Project Gutenberg, and every other place you can get books online for free (which is a lot), [i]instead[/i] of making an actual video game, that's a failure right out of the gate if you want this work to be recommended to PC gamers on Steam (which is for games, not unpublishingly awful books that you have to click through every sentence just to read). Also, $5 for something worse than pretty much any book you could find in a library or online for free... the idea that they thought this would be worth paying for is more amusing than the entire "game" is.

Worthy concept in my opinion but the game is a bit bare-bones.

The game is enjoyable, but crazy buggy at this point. The premise is good and I like the different cocktails. Fix the bugs and I'll give a positive recommendation. As it stands right now, I can't recommend it.