Affogato

Affogato... To be honest, I'd been looking forward to this game for awhile. A visual novel/reverse tower defense game? Not a combination you see often. So I went in with hopeful expectations. I'll try not to spoil too much about the experience in my review. Though I did ultimately finish the game, it's hard for me to recommend it after the fact. Overall, it felt... not quite unfinished, but rushed. The game loop is a little bit like Persona-style games wherein you follow a calendar, have deadlines for certain goals, can perform only a certain number of tasks per day, and can build connections with other characters to unlock new powers (social links). Unfortunately, many of these mechanics were half-baked at best - All of your daily activities are immediately unlocked, and even though you unlock a few more areas these are simply set pieces for the story and contain no activities. - Your social links unlock nothing until you completely finish them - The balance between activities is not good (for example, there seem to be many more activities that increase courage compared to other stats) Although the social links were mostly pretty enjoyable, I did find some of the combat for these to be unusually difficult, and one social link in particular features a luck-based witch card that made things even more frustrating. Which leads me to discussion of the combat... It had some notable good points and bad points. There are some number of story arcs (I won't spoil how many) and each arc features maps with a new core mechanic/gimmick. While creative, some of these mechanics feel more of an obstacle than something enjoyable (especially the underwater world one). The controls took a lot of getting used to on a controller and even at the end of the game I'm not 100% sure I mastered them. Even so, other than the side-missions, I found the combat pretty reasonable. The story was good, I liked the characters. I wasn't a fan of the twist as you approach the end, it seemed anticlimatic to me. But everything wraps up nicely when all is said and done. In retrospect, I would describe this game as "fine." I don't regret playing it, but this review is about whether I'd "recommend" it or not, and to be honest, I would have a hard time recommending this to people based on the clunky gameplay loop and frustrating side-missions. I think it would have been best as a visual novel, although it might not have been a game I'd have picked up in that case. Oh, and the coffee mechanic is fun, but ultimately not influential, or I just wasn't adventurous enough with it. But I almost forgot to bring it up until the very end here, that's how little it really mattered to the overall story as far as I could tell.

The parts that are polished are very polished, but I think it might've needed more time to cook. So, Affogato is a Persona 5 like where you run a coffee shop and invade people's minds to banish demons as a cozy side gig. Fights are done as a "reverse tower defense," basically routing a train of little summons around a map to kill enemy towers and hit objective points. In between fights, you progress your relationships with confidants and brew coffee in a VA11 Hall-A kind of way. The game has decent writing, wildly impressive full voice acting, and great art. The art for different drinks even changes based on the ingredients you add---not just based on which recipe you're going for, but based on things like adding extra milk to a latte. It's neat. However. A lot of the people who order drinks just order an americano. During some of your confidant conversations, you get into fights and play a battle. In others, you get into a fight and the game pauses like you're supposed to play a battle and then unpauses and keeps going, skipping past it. Likely because they didn't code it before the game shipped. Stuff on the critical path is mostly fine, but the game difficulty shoots through the moon when you enter the second act, and this feels like something that could have been smoothed out with testing and refinement. The way battles work also feels a bit scuffed on a fundamental level. You can only deploy characters based on penta, a currency that *does not* increase unless you're using a power or items or pickups to actively increase it. This means that you don't really have a choice about who to deploy. You deploy Heirophant first, because they're the class that generates penta. And then the whole rest of your gameplan needs to orbit around figuring out how to efficiently farm penta. Heirophant can only gen so much per deployment, so you need to unsummon and redeploy them at a premium, and the whole thing plays kinda like if Arknights was actively experiencing an economic crisis. The extent to which you can advance your units is also pretty limited. Levels matter a lot, so you need to power level Heirophant immediately, but then the level cap is 10 so exp kinda just becomes a measure of "can you use your new unit." Very quickly, it becomes worthless to play units that aren't maxed, and a lot of units are quite bad. Wheel Of Fortune can randomly hit you with a status effect that drains your penta, and that makes it not just unplayable but an active lose condition if you deploy it during a match. I'm not all the way through the game, and I think it has plenty of charm, but I also think it's best to remember that this is a deeply indie production even if its art and VA are punching way outside of its weight class. It's worth it on 25% sale or better, but if you crave smooth gameplay above all else you might have some friction with it. Edit: It's got gacha game difficulty (pejorative.) Stages are either way too easy, or they're hard in a boring and flat way. You get obliterated by a mechanic you had no way of knowing you should expect (when this enemy dies, it deals inescapable max damage in an aoe, so you have to use gate switches to let a single non-critical friendly unit into its area to sacrifice detonate it), and the correct path is to reload and do something finnicky and annoying to deal with the mechanic. You don't really have enough useful unit types to get creative with your deployments, and you're so constantly throttled on penta that there's functionally one right way to clear a given stage. If the stage is hard, you have to reload a few times to figure out what it is. The joy of an rpg is in expressing your style as a player through play. "There's only one right way to play play that way" makes it into a logic puzzle instead, and not a very good one because it's trying to be an rpg. 2nd Edit: So, one of Natalie's later missions. It's obnoxiously hard. Having maxed units is a minimum, you also have to have perfect timing on every action, and even then you'll lose 15+ times in a row trying to figure out the order in which the game wants you to progress through the switch puzzle. But fortunately! The answer isn't to try and solve the puzzle. You can't. You just need to full send it, deploy the Wheel Of Fortune, and hope that it will proc positive effects instead of negative ones. I think it's not unreasonable to have some complaints about this. 3rd Edit: Here's a stage with a big meaty enemy right at the start gate. He takes soooooooo long to chip through with just your starting character. Don't you just hate how long it takes. But now you're finally through him, right into two more that take even longer to chip through. Don't you just hate that soooooooo much. Okay now you're through them right into an inescapable landmine that oneshots your squad. Restart the stage and spend five minutes chipping the hp off of three unskippable tanks again. If there's a reason for this other than wasting the player's time on purpose, I can't really guess what it is.