Affogato review: Persona goes on a coffee date with tower assault dungeon crawling
Affogato review
An intriguing blend of Persona, coffee brewing and reverse tower defence dungeons that doesn’t quite cohere into a tasty whole. Developer: Befun StudioPublisher: Spiral Up GamesRelease: Out nowOn: WindowsFrom: SteamPrice: £14.29/€16.49/$17Reviewed on: Intel Core i9-11900K, 16GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 3080, Windows 10 + Steam Deck
Sometimes, a game sits at such a cross section of my interests that it almost feels made specifically for me. In the case of Affogato, it’s three of my favourite types of games mashed together: it’s Coffee Talk by way of Persona by way of any card-based tower defence game – only here it’s sort of “reverse tower defence”, as the game’s Steam page is keen to point out. It’s your own card units that are the ones moving along pre-defined tracks wreaking havoc on stationary enemies, not the other way around. Maybe tower assault would be a better term, but that’s by the by. Served with a dollop of anime froth on the top, Affogato should be my exact cuppa joe. But despite its intriguing ingredients, I wouldn’t say it’s been wholly successful in slooshing them all together.
The coffee brewing in particular feels watered down. You play as the eponymous Affogato, whose whole personality seems to be constantly correcting people about her name and hair colour (it’s magenta, not red, don’t you know). She’s a kind soul deep down, though, and takes it upon herself to solve a series of mysterious goings on in the perpetual night-time city of Arorua. These quests always originate from customers in her newly-opened coffee shop, and much like Coffee Talk, you get to make the drinks in question by dragging and dropping a mix of ingredients into your various machines.
However, the citizens of Arorua are a lot more straight-talking than the fantasy folks in Coffee Talk’s alternate Seattle, as pretty much every order is clearly spelled out for you, and almost all of what you’re asked to make is just a variation on espresso plus one other ingredient. Even when a rare signature coffee order enters the mix, the instructions for how to make them are all available on tap in dropdown menus on the left side of the screen, so you’d actively have to go out of your way to make a mistake. Similarly, there’s a whole additional menu of extra flavourings you can add after making the coffee proper, but these aren’t utilised much either. There are a couple of occasions where customers will say, ‘I’d like X but extra sweet,’ or, ‘I want something extremely bitter’, but you rarely get the chance to spread your barista wings in a regular basis.
