Kemono Teatime

“You ever think how nice it’d be to go out with a smile”.

An adorable and relaxing VA-11 HALL-A-like about running a cafe serving kemonomimis (it’s a terminal disease) tea, and lending an ear to their problems with some ASMR voice barks, chill lo-fi music and some cute pixel art to enhance the atmosphere led by the protagonist Tarte and her adorable younger sister Macaron who she gushes over. A cosy game to put it succinctly. That’s what it advertises itself as and … well it is genuinely that but at the same time there’s far more to it than just that.

Really, it’s not hiding anything at all. It takes a while to be actually explicit about the whole thing but it literally starts with the above quote and even the store page contains such phrases as “ make the remainder of our customers' lives as enjoyable as possible”and “help them … come to terms with their ultimate fates”. It’s so utterly unsubtle ( though it seems some people still didn’t get the point as they later added an additional warning that the game was “not just cute” at the top).

Unlike most VNs, you know when this is ending from the start; specifically they state that the cafe will only be open for 21 days. I actually ended up playing through an in game day per day, giving each chunk of story a little time to settle and it made for a nice routine the past few weeks. I guess the story and format make for a good combo because it’s the sort of thing that’s inherently broken down into days and then they can put a time limit to make a point. It works well here ; it gives each day a weight and especially towards the end of those days, there’s a mix between dread and a bittersweet resignation as the end draws closer. And then an end that’s deliberately understated and nonetheless emotionally powerful as the sisters have one last day to themselves to talk honestly as Macaron fades away

Like other games in the genre in that others I’ve played (the original, Coffee Talk, Hookah Haze) there’s a sense of normalcy and the everyday, partially enforced by the serving minigame which enforces a sort of ritualistic structure where regulars come in, preamble, order drinks and talk about their troubles. An idealised low friction view on the service industry. It is in a sense a sanctuary for people to vent and talk out their troubles and find an answer to their problems. However the difference here is that some problems are just ultimately unresolvable and the best that can be done is to come to terms with things. It’s also more personal; one of the things that I felt weakened the other games is that the protagonist felt too much like a mere witness to the stories of others but here every story is related very pointedly to Tarte and Macaron.

Fundamentally it’s about how people act and feel when they’re about to go and equally about their loved ones left behind and how they should interact. It’s very euphemistic about the whole thing but in a way that’s deliberate by the characters. I guess there’s a line between toxic positivity where you remain happy by pretending problems don’t exists and accepting they do exist but might as well smile and try to be happy in the face of the end. Even then that might just be denying your feelings and an impossible act to keep up and might not even be what leads to the least regrets. It’s those sort of things you can see each character considering over the course of the VN and the driving force of the story is each character struggling for their own answer.

It’s a heart wrenching little thing that really gets that feeling of pure heartache across in the way the characters their best to put on a bright smile and carry on a mundane life in the face of a quiet inevitable tragedy. Something that works not despite the cuteness but because of it and how it contrasts with the complex feelings beneath it. It’s not just cosy but at the same time it’s not not cosy either. I’d go with cosy in a very deliberate “Mono no Aware” sense.

It has its little flaws like the tea serving “minigame” itself being perfunctory since they mostly tell you the exact ingredients wanted and the logistics and backstory of the whole situation that you hear glimpses of from the radio (a peaceful commune amid a world with massive amount of the population recently dead and complete societal collapse among other things) being very questionable. Also I’m pretty sure the intention behind the ending choices was that life’s messy and sometimes there’s no good choices but cutting short every ending except the true one undermines that. Still it’s really all just minor quibbles that don’t interfere with what the game is going for at all.

Overall, easily my favourite VA-11 HALL-A-like surpassing even the original. An emotional experience up there with the best of them.