Indie Game of the Week 442: Necrobarista

Continuing our spooky month here on IGotW—if somewhat incidentally—we have the western (sort of; the developers are Australian) visual novel Necrobarista from Route 59 Games, concerning a Melbourne coffee house that serves not only the living but the recently departed on their way to whatever awaits them next. The story focuses around a number of staff and customers to this coffee house, named The Terminal, as they deal with themes typical to the subject matter: loss, bereavement, lingering regrets, and trepidation about taking a step toward the great unknown. Specifically, the titular "necrobarista" Maddy Xiao has reservations about taking over the establishment from her former boss and mentor Chay Wu, while also taking care of the restless technological wunderkind Ashley, clashing with local boorish authority figure Ned, and commiserating with the recently passed self-effacing sadsack Kishan.

I call Necrobarista a visual novel because it itself does also, but I'll admit to only possessing a somewhat shaky definition of the term. I've long since learned to separate what differentiates a visual novel with a traditional Japanese-style adventure game—Ace Attorney and Hotel Dusk decidedly belong to the latter group, for example, despite the familiar "talking portraits" presentation of the former—but I couldn't tell you if a 3D game like this necessarily applies due to whatever strict definitions may or may not be attached to the term. However, it is an entirely passive affair where you simply click through to the next line (and occasionally click past the pauses, which I found a bit awkward since I was expecting some manner of transition to play out) much like visual novels so I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt: using 3D models in fact allows the game to add a touch of dynamism to the storytelling, in lieu of much in the way of animation, due to the way they can move the camera around in scenes and change the angles for dramatic effect, zooming in on surprised faces or framing shots from above scenes or behind foreground objects for a cinematic flourish. The game is broken up into several chapters, each typically around 5 to 30 minutes long, with an intermission breather of sorts between each just so you aren't expected to absorb about four hours of plot all in one go.

Those intermissions are where you're allowed to take in The Terminal by exploring it with first-person movement controls, finding incidental stories in various props lying around. It's an interesting way to break up the main narrative, letting you take in some supplementary text that helps establish the cast of characters further or delves into the nature of this place that sits between two worlds, while also giving you the option to eschew it all together and speak to Maddie to move onto the next chapter of the overarching story. These "memories", as these bonus reading hotspots are called, include materials written by the characters, tales about lost souls that have passed through in the past like a weary fisherman reliving his mistakes or a flashy billiards champ worried he wasted his talents by insisting on trick-shot showmanship, or additional details about how the more supernatural elements of the plot function like alchemy and spirit possession. Given the whole game involves reading a lot of text, these extra tales serve as excellent palate cleansers before jumping back into the main story.

I've probably made this game sound a lot more saturnine than it actually is. Obviously the themes of death and grief factor into it a great deal but there's also plenty of levity with that sort of brusque yet endearing Antipodean ribbing between characters with a lot of shared history, as well as amusing bon mots and some truly terrible pun work. The child characters are shown to be precocious in some aspects and less so in others, with engineering whiz kid Ashley wondering why ferromagnetic materials often have iron in them when they're supposed to be "ferro" or how two of the teen characters assume a third is making stuff up about a whale shark being the largest fish since they weren't aware whales or sharks could be fish (which reads to me as either a very teen convo or a very Dan Ryckert convo) are the sort of strange yet entirely possible omissions of common knowledge a kid might possess. Being a somewhat trendy (in the underground sense) (and not just because dead people) coffee house there's also plenty of more contemporary takes on sexuality—at least one of the main characters is gay—and how living in the present day is certainly more convenient if not necessarily easier or conducive to having optimism for the future. There's also a trio of talking robots that provide a coda to each chapter: these are mostly jokey asides that remind me a bit of the way your drones would sometimes converse during quieter moments of NieR: Automata but they'll occasionally contribute their thoughts to the overall narrative and the way it's shaking out. It's a game that takes advantage of multiple perspectives on life and death from some very different people, and a balancing act that works because everyone involved has some appealing aspects to them—even Ned the fed (heavily implied to be notorious 19th century criminal Ned Kelly, given he wears a cylindrical helmet that he never removes) has a measure of empathy to him due to centuries of facing down his demons and trying to choose the right moral path to compensate for a lifetime of villainy.

Necrobarista won't be for everyone, of course, given it's essentially a book with pictures about sad dead people ordering flat whites from sardonic servers to calm their nerves before taking that big final leap to the next phase of their existence but I appreciated its humor, its philosophical musings about the afterlife and the importance of letting things go, its marriage of science and the metaphysical as a backdrop, a setting that combines the cold and industrial (it's in a dockyard full of pipes and scaffolding) with the warm and familiar, and those occasionally harrowing bonus stories that brought to mind Lost Odyssey's "A Thousand Years of Dreams" asides. It also slots in nicely with thematically similar games like VA-11 Hall-A and Coffee Talk in using the time-honored trope of venting (venti-ing?) your troubles to a sympathetic bartender (or barista in this case; though The Terminal does also serve alcohol) to allow for a multitude of tales to be told. Also, if you happen to be curious about visual novels but put off by all the anime aesthetics for some reason, this might be a bit more of a palatable gateway to what's become a favored subgenre for those Indie developers with a yarn to spin.

Rating: 4 out of 5.