Have you ever wanted to just run away and open a cafe in a new city? I will offer you a word of warning now, if the answer to that is even slightly affirmative, Coffee Talk Tokyo may drag you down that rabbit hole quicker than you thought.
Coffee Talk Tokyo is, unsurprisingly, a game in the Coffee Talk series. Billed as brewing and talking simulators, these games have you running a cafe and caring for your supernatural clientele in a way only a batista can (with good drinks and a better ear). Coffee Talk Tokyo takes place in Tokyo, in 2026, with your cafe lodged in the back of one of the many skyscrapers dotting the skyline.
Much like in the first two games, gameplay here alternates between pressing A to scroll through text, looking at your in-game phone, or working the coffee machine. Coffee Talk Tokyo is not a strenuous game by any means, and the only consequence for failure is an unhappy customer. Unfortunately, unhappy customers do not make good friends, and this will alter the stories you can experience in the long term, but it won’t give you a game over or anything that black and white.
This is my main negative, and one that I’ve had with all three games in the franchise. Maybe it’s the makeup of my brain, but a lot of the time I make the wrong drinks just because the customers are unclear with their order. Sometimes they’ll ask you for a specific named drink (which you can look up using your in-game phone’s recipe section, or even using hints in the in-universe social network) but often they will just give vague descriptors like sweet or milky. Whilst this obviously makes it a perfect mirror to dealing with actual customers in the real world, and definitely makes Coffee Talk Tokyo feel natural in its writing, it also means that getting the endings you want can be a little more stressful than these cosy narrative games perhaps should be.
Brewing drinks involves selecting a type of drink, then adding your primary ingredient, then two secondary ones (on applicable drinks you can also doodle some cute art afterwards). Other than my aforementioned issues with the actual orders, the actual controls are incredibly intuitive, and break up the reading simulator aspect quite nicely.
The reading is the main reason you’re here though. With this entry in the series being set in Tokyo, your customers are yokai and of a more Japanese spin than before, both in species and culture. Still, people are people, and the writing in Coffee Talk Tokyo is as superb as always. Characters feel fully realised, and the story is an absolute joy to experience.
Visuals and audio also match the vibe perfectly. Every decision feels deliberate. Every artistic choice feels agonised over, and much like in real life, I sometimes find myself just sitting there, staring at the shadows walking past the window, listening to the world. Coffee Talk Tokyo somehow manages to capture nearly every positive aspect of that idealised dream we all have in our head of doing this kind of thing. We don’t have to worry about the cost of beans, or the price of electricity. All you have to do is help a musician through his creative slump, or a ghost try and solve her unfinished business.
The bitterness of occasional unclear instruction aside, Coffee Talk Tokyo is almost a perfect brew. If you just want to unwind for a night and lend an ear to some truly charming patrons, I can’t recommend grabbing a seat behind the bar of this cafe enough.
Coffee Talk Tokyo was reviewed on Xbox Series X, but is also available on Steam, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, and PlayStation 5.