THE MAKING OF . . .

Visual and novel: the story behind a bittersweet and distinctively Australian brew

By Chris Schilling

Format iOS, PC

Developer Route 59

Publisher Coconut Island Games, Route 59 

Origin Australia 

Release 2020

The Terminal is the kind of coffee house we can imagine ourselves frequenting. Or at least we could were it not occupying a liminal space between life and death. Here, the recently deceased get to spend one last day among the living as they come to terms with their departure from this world. It’s a place that grapples with the concept of time as a currency, whose patrons gamble in the hope of extending their stay, and whose owner has accrued a temporal debt that needs to be called in. Which feels particularly apropos when it comes to Necrobarista, a game that was approaching its own development terminus when its time was suddenly extended. Per its announcement trailer, the original plan was to launch in October 2017. It wasn’t until July 2020 that it was finally released.

In a way, that’s no great surprise, since developer Route 59 Games had grand aims for its debut from the start. A visual novel would seem to be a smart, efficient way to get started with game design; tools such as Twine offer a relatively fast and cost-effective way of creating text-based games. But director Kevin Chen and colleagues Ngoc Vu (lead artist) and Joe Liu (3D artist) had other ideas: the plan when development started, Chen says, was to make “the next-gen visual novel”. What did they mean by that? “Most visual novels are a lot more novel and a lot less visual,” he elaborates. “Or they use visuals to complement and accent the narrative. But visual storytelling is a whole craft in itself, right? Like film, comics, manga, anime – the way a composition is framed, the way that character expressions tell the story. One thing I always said early on is that I think we would have succeeded if you were able to turn the text off for Necrobarista and still kind of get the gist of what’s happening.”

Admittedly, we haven’t tested that theory – nor would we particularly want to when faced with a game written so thoughtfully. But as we said in our review in E350, Necrobarista often feels more akin to a player-guided film than a visual novel, with more care and attention paid to the way conversations – and, for that matter, dialogue-free establishing and interstitial shots – are framed than we normally see in the genre. (If there’s another visual novel which credits a director of photography – hats off to Brent Arnold – we can’t recall it.) The player is given a rare degree of control over the way scenes are paced, each click of the mouse effectively turning us into director and editor all at once. How fitting, then, that after the game’s original prototype, Little Moon, won an award for Best Narrative at Melbourne’s Freeplay Independent Games Festival, Route 59 was able to secure funding from Film Victoria’s production fund to develop the game further.