Necrobarista is about hipsters, baristas, and death
Coffee black as death
You know how, sometimes, games look so good you just want to eat them? You want to print out all the screenshots in glorious, glossy photo paper, and just put them into your mouth? You know that feeling? Yeah, that's how I feel about upcoming visual novel game Necrobarista [official site].
I mean, we're probably going to look back on the 2010s and wonder why every indie video game had that sort of gentle sunset glow dominating its colour palette. But I don't mind. I love that Firewatch-y wash of warmth that Necrobarista has, almost as much as I love the Sherlock-style dialogue boxes that seem like they're part of the world.
(-don't mention Sherlock,- a voice whispers in disgust. -we don't talk about Sherlock any more.-)
The concept behind it all is as delicious as the art: a coffee shop in Melbourne where the dead mingle amongst the living. I'm hoping for something in-between Grim Fandango and, maybe, Terry Pratchett/Neil Gaiman, a sort of warm, witty, but strange approach to death, but it's hard to tell exactly what the tone is from the short trailer.
Route 59 Games describe it as "an original visual novel combining a supernatural suspense story with a stylised cinematic presentation influenced by anime aesthetics" which is, wow, a long run-on sentence, but implies that Necrobarista will be perhaps similar to 2016 bartending game VA11-HALL-A, but with coffee instead of booze. Or maybe booze as well. Sometimes coffee isn't enough, you know?
Hopefully we'll be seeing more of Necrobarista before its release in October this year.