As TheGamer’s resident detective game enjoyer, I’ve tried a lot of Steam games that force you to piece mysteries together. I like a lot of them – put some red thread and a corkboard in a game and I’m down to go on a journey – but there aren’t many that I immediately love.
Best Served Cold feels different. Perhaps not at first, but certainly as you dig deeper into its central mystery. You play a bartender at a Prohibition-era speakeasy, except you’re in an alternate history Europe in a city called Bukovie. As your landlord reminds you, annoying the wrong people could very well get your bar closed down, and you don’t want that to happen, since he’s taken a chance on you by giving you a job despite your checkered past.
Save The Speakeasy, Save Your Own Hide
It’s this chequered past that inevitably leads a detective to come to your speakeasy and ask you to help him solve a murder. Well, a string of murders, actually – Bukovie has a serial killer, targeting women in speakeasies like yours, on the same boulevard as yours, and he wants you to ask your clients questions. In return for information, he won’t get the bar closed down, and he won’t get you in trouble for the things you’ve done in your past life. You don’t have much of a choice, so you strike a deal.
It’s how you do this that’s the fun part. While a lot of games of this type can feel rigid – games like Coffee Talk lead you through set storylines, for example – Best Served Cold feels like it requires real skill and deftness to succeed. There are a surprising number of factors feeding into the kind of information you’re able to get out of people, including how good a judge of people you are.
When you speak to a customer, you’re given some insight into them through the UI, which tells you their mood, how drunk they are, and how affectionate they are towards you. This sounds more straightforward than it actually is. You might assume that the drunker people are, the more they talk, and the better the mood they’re in, the better the information you get, but that isn’t always the case. Some people might only talk about certain things when they get angry, which might then lead you to ruin their day by serving them a bad drink on purpose. And customers will leave if they get too drunk, so making them the strongest drink possible might not be the best move.
Want A Drink?
Getting them drunk is the fun part. As you serve customers drinks from your limited menu (this is during Prohibition, so you don’t have a ton of ingredients to play with), you’ll learn what they like and what they don’t. Asking them about their preferences will log that information in your handy notebook and help you figure out what they like and dislike. Serving them drinks they like will increase their affection for you more than drinks they’re neutral about, and serving their favourite drinks will put them in a good mood. Serving ruined drinks will put them in a bad mood, and make you lose all but one action for the rest of your conversation with them. As you discover what each customer likes and dislikes, that information is marked in the menu with different indicators.
You’ll also pick the drinks you make based on their alcohol tolerance and how many actions you want to add to the conversation. The menu will indicate the smoothness of a drink (the number of actions added) as well as how strong it is. There’s also an indicator for your customer’s tolerance – go over a certain number, and they’ll get too drunk to keep hanging out.
Actions can be used to ask questions and show them evidence, but I’ll get into that later.
You’re a bartender, but you don’t actually have to muck around behind the bar and manually grab ingredients into a shaker. The mixology process is abstracted into a simple task. Every drink has a unique shape to trace with your cursor – for example, the Copper Bullet is, aptly, a bullet shape, while the Pirate’s Joy is a hook, and Cold Winter is a snowflake. A red arrow will chase your cursor as you trace the shape, and if it catches up, your drink is ruined.
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Make Drinks, Make Conversation
As you speak to customers, you can ask them questions by spending your actions. This might tell you more about them and their backgrounds, but responding the way each character likes will also increase how much they like you.
This isn’t as simple as just being nice to everyone – some characters might like witty banter and a bit of push back, while others want you to acquiesce to them and make them feel important. Every character feels incredibly distinct and well-written, with their own insecurities and moral grey areas. I was particularly fond of Wendy, who was sharply observant and vibrant while obviously having her own secrets. Just my type of gal.
I was quite taken aback that things I’d say in real life so often annoyed characters, and then I remembered that I’m a pretty blunt person and our bartender probably needs to approach things with more tact.
As you investigate, you’ll collect clues that you can review in your notebook and show to customers. They might give you more information, admit to certain things, or just get annoyed that you’re being confrontational and tell you to buzz off. At the end of every day, you get to go home and put all your evidence on a corkboard and piece it together with red thread, which obviously had me absolutely thrilled. You can combine clues to create new evidence, and add and remove things as you wish. You’ll also need to figure out the opportunity and motive for each of your suspects, and submit your case to the detective before two weeks is up and the case gets escalated within the police.
The gameplay is complex and absorbing, but I was just as taken with the game’s writing. Bukovie is ridden with class struggle and a seedy underbelly, full of people fighting just to survive, let alone thrive. Each of its characters reveal something new about the game’s setting – the tense interpersonal relationships between those who have and have not, the way poor people are looked right through, and even its unique culture and religion.
The whole thing feels much more complex than your typical visual novel, and I can’t wait to see how it all unfolds over the full game’s five cases. Best Served Cold doesn’t have a release date yet, but you can wishlist it on Steam and try the demo for free.
- Developer(s)
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Rogueside
- Publisher(s)
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Rogueside