How often do you think about dying? For me, it’s every day. The first time I can consciously remember fearing death was at around five years old; the first time I remember wanting death was at around thirteen. I tend to bounce around between, “God, I hope I don’t die,” and, “God, I wish I was dead,” on a pretty routine basis. Every single day of my life, death stalks my mind in some capacity, and it’s only in recent years that I’ve started to make some semblance of peace with that.
Necrobarista is a game preoccupied with striving for that peace. The charming visual novel is equal parts bleak and hopeful, bitter and sweet, macabre and magical. It’s a game that grapples with death on very frank, very human terms that gaming rarely does, and ultimately serves as a compelling argument for cherishing and celebrating what life you have left.
“Time Is Like A Clock In My Heart”
Set at a coffee shop between the dead and the living, Necrobarista primarily follows Maddy - a sardonic but well-meaning barista desperate to pay off the shop’s debts. Aided by a motley crew of coworkers, like an over-caffeinated preteen inventor and a poor sap who hasn’t begun to fully process his death, Maddy takes on odd jobs and dabbles in gambling to pay back their landlord. In what currency, you ask?
Time. As in, the last moments that humans spend alive in the shop.
Necrobarista confronts players with a moral paradigm throughout its runtime: is it ethical to build a capitalist system based solely around time as currency? Granted, that’s kind of what capitalism is to begin with - a destructive, caustic system built purely on wasting our time, threatening poverty and homelessness if we don’t comply - but this game makes that more tangible. If you were in a position to give people more time to process their deaths, and if you could actually help make that process a more peaceful one, would you do it or would you continue to participate in a broken, classist economic model?
You’re not really given the choice here, as Necrobarista is a linear visual novel, but the questions raised will stick with you for a while after you finish it. How much value can you place on the time you have left in the world? Would you gamble for more, or try to make the most of what you have? If you could, would you surrender time to a spiritual landlord, or would you give it back to the souls trapped in purgatory?
A Place Where Everyone Knows Your Name
Necrobarista’s heady depths lurk behind a veneer of anime homages and cozy setpieces, all delivered via accessible visual novel gameplay. However, just saying that feels a tad disingenuous, as I’ve played hundreds of visual novels in my life and can say there hasn’t been one quite like this.
Unlike traditional VN experiences, Necrobarista is rendered with both beautiful 3D models and dynamic camera angles - along with brief first-person segments inside the coffee shop. Plenty of VNs have messed with 3D at this point, to varying degrees of success, but this game makes the most of its models and environments in a way I’ve never seen. Each click not only progresses the dialogue, but also pans the camera, switches to different shots, or smash cuts to another scene entirely. The cinematography in this game, speaking as somebody who’s studied film, is impeccable, and some of the absolute best that’s ever been accomplished in this medium.
Furthermore, speaking as anime fan, this is one of the few anime homages that doesn’t make me flinch out of my skin like a snake. The dev team seems uninterested in going, “Wow, let’s make these characters look like anime,” and instead decide to do a deliberate, painstaking tribute to the aesthetics, filmcraft techniques, and character tropes that make up so much contemporary anime. The result is something that’s less a tribute, and much more of a distinct riff on the medium.
That applies to the characters, too. Yes, most of them are familiar tropes - especially the aforementioned inventor and the suave, pretty boy Chay - but they don’t feel like lazy rehashes. Instead, a longtime anime viewer will likely be endeared by character types they recognize, and feel comfortable dipping their toes into the initially oblique and masked story. While the characters have profound depths that you’ll eventually get to, their function is ultimately a comforting and familiar one - much like a good coffee shop.
Moving On
Necrobarista isn’t going to leave me any time soon. This is, inevitably, going to be the experience I compare most games to this year. There’s so much raw inventiveness here, and so many brilliant ideas lurking in the game - so many ideas on how to do passive storytelling, how to successfully translate animation to gaming, how to make visual novels even better than they already are. It’s an astounding accomplishment for the medium.
Because too few games, I think, want you to engage with the text quite as much as Necrobarista does. It’s a game that wants you to grapple with uncomfortable questions about the final destination for every living creature, and that begs players to question how they’re spending their life.
As somebody who grapples with my mortality every day, Necrobarista helped me want to live each day to the fullest - lest my time be stolen away in the blink of an eye. And for a game to have that impact on a person, for a work of art to rattle the soul that thoroughly, is perhaps one of the highest forms of art that I can think of.
A PC copy of Necrobarista was provided to TheGamer for this review. Necrobarista is available now for PC.
