A spirit-attuned pop star, a yuki-onna (ghostly snow woman) who runs a neighborhood restaurant and the ghost of a teen girl unable to pass into the next world all walk into — not a bar, but a coffee shop.
It’s a new spin on a classic joke, and also the premise behind Coffee Talk Tokyo, a visual novel game from Indonesia-based Toge Productions launching May 21. Set in a near-future Tokyo infused with sci-fi and fantasy elements, a hodgepodge cast of characters gathers in a late-night coffee shop where they work through personal, professional and supernatural troubles.
Coffee Talk Tokyo is the third entry in the series, which was previously set in a version of Seattle populated by humans, vampires and fairies alike. The first game in the franchise to make the trip over the Pacific trades those creatures of Western folklore for a menagerie of Japanese yōkai (spirits) and ordinary humans who dabble in the fantastic — including a recently retired salaryman who also happens to be a kappa (water spirit) struggling to find meaning beyond work; a workaholic scientist raising a mixed-species daughter with her stay-at-home, half-beast, full-British husband; and a coffee shop assistant, whose futuristic prosthetics hint at a serious accident in their past.
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