This was one of the Playstation Plus games that were given away to anyone that has an account. I pay for this membership because it is extremely low-priced and you get 2 or more "free" games per month and most of the time at least one of them is worth the membership price on its own. Sometimes you get lucky and both the games are good.
That was not the case in May where we received Coffee Talk as one of our free games.
When I read that this was a game about talking to customers and working at a coffee shop of course I thought it sounded stupid, but I loaded it up anyway hoping for some sort of indie idea that maybe was strange, but still really good. For me, that is not what this experience is.
For one thing, you are going to do a lot of reading because it brought me back to a time when games couldn't do spoken and audible dialogue and we had no choice but to read it all. We are past those days now of course, but not everyone wants to do that - or maybe they are not capable of doing so. I dunno.
In the game, you literally work at a late night coffee shop and people come in and you talk to them and make them whatever type of drink they ask for. This isn't a side-quest in the game - this is the entire game.
The people come in and talk to you about their problems in entirely written and extremely drawn out dialogue and then eventually order a drink but they don't always order the actual drink that they want, sometimes they will say something like "give me something bitter that will keep me awake with some milk in it." Then you go the coffee machine controls and do exactly that.
There are a lot of simulator games out there and I've never really understood the purpose of most of them. I dabbled with Farming Simulator for a little while and found that game amusing because two generations ago everyone in my family tree actually was a farmer. I can assure you that they would find it extremely amusing that there is a game that people play for "fun" that they did backbreaking work on each day just to be able to eat and have shelter.
Coffee Talk is by far one of the most boring games that I have ever played and I can't believe that there is actually a collector's edition of this game out there and people paid money for it.
You play the barista in a future world where people are orcs, elves, humans, and other exotic creatures but this doesn't really change anything because nothing exciting ever happens. I will admit that I did NOT complete this game and after playing for just 20 minutes I ended up skipping all the beep beep beep beep dialogue that kept popping up on the screen as I waited for the customers to order something.
If this looks like something that is extremely boring I can assure you that this is exactly what Coffee Talk is. There is no game here actually. The stories the customers tell you are meant to be tragic and show how a lot of people have a lot of problems but if there is a "fantastic story" in there I'm not going to sit through this drivel to figure it out.
I can't believe that this game actually got made and I am a little bit upset that PlayStation would even bother making this one of their free PS Plus games and think no one was going to complain about it.
This game was on my machine for less than an hour and I think that probably ended up being the case with a lot of other people as well. I can't imagine anyone paying actual money for this experience but apparently a bunch of people did!