3.5 stars rounded up
Coffee Talk is a visual novel. That means it's mostly advancing conversations. You play the owner/operator of a coffee shop in a world at a similar technological place, but populated by elves, werewolves, vampires, etc. And humans. There's a few humans, too. And as a coffee shop owner, you participate in the conversations patrons have, and those patrons become friends and confidantes.
Your character is never seen, so you can imagine them to be anything you want. I imagined human/female, which worked really well with the conversations. That said, your character is written to be the least interesting person in the conversations—kind, yes, but tinged with professional formality. This is much more about everyone else. There's a fun slate of patrons, each with their own little storyline that goes on a unique arc throughout the VN.
We have one element of interaction (beyond pressing A to continually advance the dialogue): Making drinks. There are a wide variety of drinks that can be made—some with specific names and recipes, others you can just cobble together on the fly from a variety of bases (coffee, tea, chocolate, milk) and flavor options (cinnamon, honey, ginger, etc). Sometimes patrons request something specific (espresso, say) or something general ("warm and sweet"). And coffee-based drinks with milk can also be given "latte art" swirls on top—something that I didn't even see the need for, but which was a fun little mechanic to be included. (Thankfully, no one is actually judging the ensuing "art" as all of mine ended up looking a bit like a 3-leaf clover that had wilted.)
As the drinks are the one way we have any input, there is a bit of a puzzle with them. Not just finding a drink patrons like, but actually finding their trademark drink and giving it to them at the right time. Sometimes this is obvious (such as with the werewolf patron who leads you through this process in an understandable way), but other times it's not so obvious. I'll admit I looked several of them up on a walkthrough. I think that finding a character's drink (and, presumably, giving it at the right time) effects the way their story arc ends up, though I won't really know until I play a second time to see if those outcomes do, in fact, change. But it does seem as though the characters whose drinks I never found had less finality to their endings than those I did.
I would have liked Coffee Talk to have been longer, but it isn't as short as I was afraid it'd be. My biggest problem, actually, is with a small, stupid detail: At the end, the character endings are delivered via paragraph-long summaries. The game stacks those summaries so there's multiple per screen, but unlike with the dialogue there's no choice to advance the screen—and the timer those screens are on is too damn short. I didn't have enough time to read Freya's ending—and she's the main character (even more so than our perspective character). And I wasn't going to reload my prior save (which was, like, several hours back) just to read those few sentences. Why not advance those pages with a button press like the dialogue?
But the real draw here is the characters. I came to love and enjoy each of them. It was satisfying seeing their stories arc in and out of the coffee shop. If I play this again, it'll be to spend more time with them. And like a real coffee shop at its best, the experience is relaxing.
People not used to VNs may be thrown for a loop by dialogue-heavy element of the game, but Coffee Shop ended up a really nice experience that I enjoyed spending time with.
