四叶草咖啡厅 (2024)

RPG Maker strikes again! 四叶草咖啡厅 is one of hundreds of low effort retro-pixel RPG Maker asset/construction kit flips spamming the Steam catalog, made with the RPG Maker video game construction kit... in their own words, "Our easy to use tools are simple enough for a child." Like all RPG Maker "games", this is essentially a bunch of low quality/canned assets from RPG Maker coupled with a cringeworthy high school anime club fan fiction. This RPG Maker fan-fiction is mostly about a cafe/bar in a fantasy universe where you get to talk to the developers imaginary girlfriend/waifu. The developer couldn't work out how to make an RPG with RPG Maker (the only thing it can do, and it's terrible at it), so this is mostly badly written, cringey high school anime club dropout fan-fiction stuff, guaranteed to make you cringe. As with all RPG Maker games, the poor quality engine displays badly in fullscreen and doesn't have full HD support or any graphics tweaking options, making this unacceptable for any dedicated modern PC gamer. The point can be made that the intention of RPG Maker is to make demos and small games to pass around friends, and shouldn't be used for "professional" game devel…

四叶草咖啡厅 is a really unusual little visual novel, and I liked how much personality it manages to get out of such a simple setting. During the day I am sitting in a quiet modern cafe with only a few customers around, while at night the place becomes a strange tavern filled with ghosts, monsters and other supernatural visitors. I thought the contrast was really charming and immediately gave the game its own identity. The main gameplay is built around talking to the people who visit the cafe. There is not much in the way of complicated mechanics, as most of the experience comes from clicking through conversations and learning about the characters. I actually enjoyed this because it makes the guests themselves the main attraction. Each person has their own story, and the game encourages me to keep talking to them rather than constantly searching for some larger objective. The strange supernatural setting also gives the conversations a lot of variety. These creatures have adapted to modern society, so I get to see how ghosts and monsters deal with ordinary everyday situations. I liked the humor that comes from putting traditional supernatural characters into a modern cafe environment, w…