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Affogato review: Persona goes on a coffee date with tower assault dungeon crawlingAn acquired taste
An acquired taste
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Spiral Up Games
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Spiral Up Games
Coffee orders are flagged up on the screen, and full instructions on how to make them can be accessed from the drop down menu on the left. Alas, nearly every coffee uses espresso as a base, and so the actual coffee making gets quite repetitive over time. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Spiral Up Games
However, the citizens of Arorua are a lot more straight-talking than the fantasy folks in Coffee Talk’s alternate Seattle, as pretty much every order is clearly spelled out for you, and almost all of what you’re asked to make is just a variation on espresso plus one other ingredient. Even when a rare signature coffee order enters the mix, the instructions for how to make them are all available on tap in dropdown menus on the left side of the screen, so you’d actively have to go out of your way to make a mistake. Similarly, there’s a whole additional menu of extra flavourings you can add after making the coffee proper, but these aren’t utilised much either. There are a couple of occasions where customers will say, ‘I’d like X but extra sweet,’ or, ‘I want something extremely bitter’, but you rarely get the chance to spread your barista wings in a regular basis.
This lack of freedom makes a lot of Affogato’s coffee-brewing feel repetitive and underutilised - especially when it limits you to only making coffee during specific points in the story. Outside of these set story beats, for example, it’s structured much like a Persona game, split into mornings and evenings where you can complete one activity in each time slot before the clock ticks forward, and late night where you have to go to sleep and advance the day. On any given morning, for example, you could open the coffee shop to earn a bit of money. Affogato still needs to pay her rent at two week intervals, after all, and doing your job will help you save a nominal amount alongside the cash you earn from completing its set story missions (more on those in a sec). But you’re not afforded the luxury of actually serving these customers. The whole thing just happens automatically, giving you a wodge of cash at the end of it.
I started playing Affogato on my Steam Deck (where it currently classes it as Playable rather than Verified). Its gamepad controls are fine, but its complex battle scenes play a lot better with mouse and keyboard on a larger monitor. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Spiral Up Games
I say ‘some’, as once I happened upon a particular combo to generate a decent amount of penta (shout out to my man, Hermit), I found I didn’t need to use anything else for the rest of the game. There are other cards you can buy from your demon pal Mephista, and further cards that get unlocked when you start helping out other characters in their little side stories, but I was able to use the first eight cards I obtained during the natural course of the game for pretty much its entire runtime, without ever feeling the need to switch things up.
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Altogether, Affogato does a reasonable impression of all three types of game it’s trying to emulate here, but it also spreads itself too thin in the process. Each part of its demonic triumvirate lacks the full-bodied flavour that really makes them sing when they’re viewed in isolation, and while I’ve enjoyed it plenty over its 15-odd hour runtime, it’s mostly just left me hungry for the real thing. It will no doubt be someone’s cuppa joe, but I’m not sure it’s mine.
