Playing Every Game in the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality
PEGBRJE: ‘Just one, must choose’ and ‘Some Like It Hot: Chapter 0’
Oh no.
Just one, must choose is a narrative game jam game created by olaznogo, an indie dev who submitted this for the GMTK Game Jam of 2019. Players do not have much to do, other than to read and make a single decision.
Which colour? There are five of them on the screen, wanting to be selected. They can be moved around and put in to different orientations, only to be reset by the square at the top. After a bit of banter, a static text will appear to state that pressing space while hovering over a singular colour will select it. That is where things cease, however, for immediately the game will laugh at the decision and discuss the dangers of being exclusionary. And then… it ends.
I’m not sure what I expected. Even playing through it a few times and getting a different ending, the idea is still there; making choices is bad, but also good? It’s a catch 22 — you cannot progress without making a decision, but by making a decision you are in the trap of the game itself. Do you just not play the game at all? Is there something to exploit? That’s up to you to discover; it only takes a few minutes to breeze through so if you want to have a haughty voice telling you that you made bad decisions then by all means try this out and see if you can ‘break’ it.
Some Like It Hot: Chapter 0 is a prequel demo to the upcoming visual novel by AugEx, an indie studio based in Canada. Playing from the perspective of the exiting employee of a quaint coffee shop called The Java Joint, players will ensure that whomever shows up here next will be as prepared as possible.
Oh, and I’m the one who wrote it.
I’ve dreaded this day for two years. Let’s begin, shall we?
The game serves as both a demo and a prequel, meaning that it serves as a proof of the gameplay while also giving a unique story. The guide that players are ‘working’ on then covers as a tutorial for the demo itself, as it needs to be cleaned up for the next employee (who is alluded to be the player of the full game ). This has players making coffee in a Flash-game style by dragging ingredients in to the cup, clicking dials, and filling out the orders on the right.
Depending on the game mode, this will either be done in a narrative sense to continue the story or in a rapid-fire mode that we lovingly called ‘Rush Hour’ where players would attempt to fill as many drinks as possible in a short time span.
In the narrative mode, however, what players give as a drink to their customer is weighted a bit differently. In Rush Hour, players would just get strikes for getting drinks wrong. In narrative mode, giving a drink to a returning customer such as our little nerd friend below can either make or break the conversations that come afterwards.
The narrative aspect is the main draw of a visual novel, and players will be introduced to three of the cast members within the demo. The first, Terra, runs The Java Joint in a disheveled yet somehow organized manner, using quirky code words and lighthearted banter to keep things fun.
Daniel is the only customer that appears, a walking embodiment of paradoxical fascination with the fast life and routines. It helps that he’s probably loaded, but that could be inferred by the fact that he’s gotten more than one latte from The Java Joint every day for years.
Finally players meet the employee that’s sticking around in Gabe, the almost-too-relaxed barista known for taking the edge off of every conversation no matter how serious it may get. He could try, but then he wouldn’t be so gosh-darn smooth, and that would ruin all the lack of work he does to look like that.
With these three, the player discusses the future of what the store will look like without them, especially to a nerve-wracked Daniel who cannot fathom the idea of someone else making his drink. Each of the characters helps to represent the three relationships a barista would have between boss, customer and fellow employee — which then allows for players to relate to them that much quicker.
Many people I know have worked a part time job in some form of service or retail and know the horrors it can bring, while also somehow reminiscing on all the little interactions that made it bearable. It’s why there are so many games about working in small shops; the idea of retail services is cozy as long as there are no actual people involved.
As you might have noticed, this is quite difficult for me to write about in the way that I’ve done every game because, as stated above, I’m the one who wrote it. I knew the duo that started AugEx back in university and even helped draft the story as a silly narrative after stopping for coffee on the way home.
When they came to me after graduating wanting to make it in to an actual game, I joined to write the words and the preliminary soundtrack hoping to finally put this idea of personifying coffee to life. The idea was to have plot threads to give possible context to the full game itself, but also have the game serve as a standalone, albeit a small one. That way anyone could play the full game without worrying about if they had or had not played the demo.
It feels weird to be looking at it after two years, seeing the puns I wrote come off just as awful as they were before while getting to see the characters that I spent hours on coming to life — especially thanks to artist Jasmine Cleofas’ cozy-as-heck art style. There are my ridiculous jokes about Sharknado, references to descaling an espresso machine and my complete over-reliance on italics.
A lot of it relies on our shared experiences, so some of the jokes may not work internationally (I don’t think college is considered expensive outside of North America…). Not every line nor joke can, after all, and you just have to set the parameters of what your world is and hope the writing can sink everyone in to it.
Normally I’d wrap this up with a ‘why you should play this game’ and a ‘who would love this game’ but I’m a tad biased in that regard. Even if it is just the demo I love everything that I was able to put in to it and what the rest of the team did. Sure, there seemed to be a dozen coffee-making games that came out at the time of its release, but that didn’t stop us from taking a silly idea and running with it.
When will the full thing come out? I’m not entirely sure, as development got halted due to various factors. All I can say is that no matter what, it turned out as cozy and as thoughtfully silly as I had hoped.
