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Playing Coffee Talk 2 felt a bit like coming home and meeting friends you haven’t seen in a while. This café in rainy Seattle sure is a special place. People with all kinds of backgrounds come together here to share a warm drink, tell a story, seek counsel or just… vibe. The Coffee Talk universe is a unique mixture of contemporary futurism and fantasy. Humans, elves, orcs, satyrs, vampires, werewolves and more inhabit this world. People go about their jobs doing everyday things like they would in our world. The fantasy aspect is really nothing more than the setup here. There are no typical medieval influences, no high elf woods, no dwarven mines; it really is just a fictionalized modern version of Seattle inhabited by all kinds of sentient creatures from the realm of fantasy.
What I find so endearing about this world is the fact that, despite the fantastical foundation, people are dealing with the same kinds of problems that we are dealing with in our world. This was already a core building block of Coffee Talk Episode One and it is all the more emphasized here. Xenophobia against certain species and outright racism are very much a thing here. Not all sentient races are recognized by the state and are thus not only excluded from society but actively hunted by federal agencies.
I like how Episode Two presents a number of people that struggle a lot with this. Riona, a new addition to the cast, is a Banshee who is trying to break into the opera scene but is frowned upon by established professionals in her field and has to face one rejection after another. This experience takes a toll on her confidence and so, one night, overcome by self-doubt, she wanders into our quaint little café in search of solace.
Neil is another character that has a hard time trying to find a place in society. We know him from the first game and his story picks up where we left off at the end of Episode One. He is now accompanied by another member of his family - Amanda, who has her own struggles trying to understand earth and earthlings. In the newspapers, you read stories about alien forces trying to invade our planet when in reality, the only aliens we come across are friendly explorers trying to build an understanding of this weird place we call earth.
How to battle prejudice and overcome the hurdles of societal conventions is not the only theme scrutinized in this game. Overcoming insecurities and becoming one’s true self is another. Baileys and Lua, a couple we met in the first game, are now planning their wedding. What starts as a fight between the two in how to plan this life-changing event slowly becomes a discussion on love, family, personal space and communication. I love how this game does that. That is something, Episode One already excelled in; taking a relatively common conflict and turning it into a soul-searching journey that helps people grow. Episode Two is just as good in this respect.
Hyde, everyone’s favorite vampire, has a similar arc. I liked how the game puts him in the spotlight a little more this time around. His arc begins with him just being bored. Immortality has lost its spice and so he’s looking for something new. Slowly he starts opening up about his past and we get a pretty full picture about who Hyde actually is. The end of his story has him facing his true self and accepting a side of him he used to ignore.
Stories like this make this game special. Every character you get to know has something interesting to tell. Every character is on a journey and you get to accompany them for a while, sometimes nudging them in the right direction. After all, that’s what a good barista does, right? And that’s what makes Coffee Talk so special; it’s more than a cool place where people hang out, it’s a haven for the restless and conflicted, a place where they come together and sometimes, become friends, lovers or family. That was the case in the first game and it still is true in this one.
Some things have changed though. Mechanically, both games are pretty much the same. Coffee Talk is a visual novel at its heart with a coffee/tea brewing mechanic on top – “Coffee” and “Talk”, it’s all in the name. You take orders from customers, look up recipes in your Brewpad or make educated guesses when instructions are unclear or you simply don’t know the recipe for a drink. That’s something that kinda bothered me a little. Just like in the first game, sometimes you just don’t know the recipe for an order. Someone comes into your café, orders a Russian Tea and you just stand there like an idiot with no idea how to make one. So, you either look up a guide (lame) or wildly combine all kinds of ingredients that you think may go into a Russian Tea. Once unlocked, the recipe goes straight into the book and you won’t have to go through all that again but still, it does feel a bit random at times.
So far, so familiar. A small change that was added in Episode Two comes in the form of items. Sometimes, customers leave something behind, by accident or willingly. In order to progress certain character-quests, you have to give specific items to specific people at specific times. Mostly, this is really obvious and you shouldn’t make too many mistakes here. There are some tricky scenes where the game expects you to hand over an item and it’s really not clear how the player is supposed to know that but that is the exception rather than the rule. For a perfect 100% run though, you have to give all the right items to all the right people and this can be confusing without a guide.
Other than receiving and giving items, the game loop remains the same as in Episode One. There is a new assortment of teas as the titular Hibiscus and Butterfly types have made their entrance. Accordingly, a couple of new, fancy recipes are available as well. On Tomodachill, the number one social media network in the world of Coffee Talk, you can now view and like stories of your friends but other than that, the game plays exactly the same.
I was satisfied with the writing for the most part. Again, this is a strength of the first game and the second continues to shine here. However, there were some dips in quality for me every now and again. Personally, I didn’t care much for one of the new characters, Lucas, and his whole influencer/finding his path storyline. I feel like younger people may relate to that more than I can but for me, his story didn’t really resonate with me and felt pretty flat overall. Another issue I had was that some scenes just drag a bit. That’s something I never felt playing Episode One. The pacing was always just right; a single chapter usually addressed one core issue before moving on to the next day. There were exceptions of course, but for the most part, the game felt extremely focused. That is no longer the case here, at least in most chapters. The game jumps from one thing to the next, sometimes packing 3 individual stories that are pretty unrelated into a single chapter making it last an hour or more. Then again, other chapters are paced the way they were in the first game, giving me a hint of closure for each chapter. It really is anything but coherent in this regard.
These gripes aside, I still enjoyed my time with Coffee Talk 2. That fuzzy warm feeling of coziness I get when playing these games is really unique. The characters actually do start feeling like family at this point and I can hardly wait to see where the series is headed in the future. If you liked the first game, which you should absolutely play before picking up this one, Episode Two will definitely captivate you just as much.