How often do you check the news and see how bleak everything is? It feels like the whole world has gone mad, and it inevitably weighs you down even if you’re not political in the slightest. In times like these, video games serve as a very good escapism tool to take your mind from all the horrible things that are happening everywhere.
But even among them, there’s a subset of games specifically designed to soothe you, make you feel comfortable and cosy without infantilizing you or insulting your intelligence. Coffee Talk Tokyo is one of these games. You can read our very positive review here.
We also got to talk with the developers of this little masterpiece, Lead Writer Anna Winterstein, and the COO of Chorus Worldwide, Fuzuki Ninomiya.
The game launches on Steam, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch and Switch 2, and Xbox Series S|X tomorrow, May 21.
Dot Esports: Coffee Talk has always been less about serving drinks and more about listening. When you started Coffee Talk Tokyo, what did you see as the emotional core that absolutely had to translate to a new city and cast?
Anna Winterstein: You’re absolutely right: the emotional core of Coffee Talk is the characters and their interactions. One thing that makes the game unique is that its fantasy setting serves as a metaphor for real, relatable issues that players may recognise, and perhaps derive some measure of hope or solace from.
Although Coffee Talk Tokyo has a brand new cast of characters and different inspirations, we’re hoping that we’ve managed to keep that same sense of connection; that by the time they’re finished with the game, players will still feel, like in the original games, that they’ve become a part of a new friend group.
Dot Esports: The first two games are strongly associated with late-night Seattle, rain, lo-fi music, and fantasy people with their very human problems. What does Tokyo let you explore that Seattle couldn’t?
Anna Winterstein: Shifting the game to Tokyo has allowed us to renew our sources of inspiration while retaining the core theme of a big city where diverse people live, interact, and often wish for meaningful connections.
Tokyo is a huge metropolis; it has as many inhabitants as a mid-sized country, and each of its areas is an independent town with its own atmosphere. At the same time, it’s fundamentally a Japanese city that proudly demonstrates most aspects of Japanese culture, which in turn are rooted in a unique, diverse lore.
Just as a few examples, Japan’s relationship to ghosts or to nature is quite different from that of the West. So we knew by moving the game to Tokyo, we could build on the Coffee Talk premise but create something new and exciting, with characters, storylines, and themes that would hopefully both feel rooted in that peculiar place and relatable to players worldwide.
Dot Esports: Coffee Talk Tokyo is set in a café shared by humans and yokai. Why did yokai feel like the right element for this entry?
Anna Winterstein: We really didn’t want Tokyo to only feel like a cosmetic change for the game. The original Coffee Talk’s Seattle feels lived in, and we wanted the same for this entry. A large part of the team is Japanese or well familiar with Japan, and we wanted to leverage that to create something that would feel true to the Tokyo experience.
Basing our character cast in Japanese lore was a pivotal part of that. Yokai are also a very diverse group of mythical creatures, with some reflecting a philosophy, others a cultural tradition, and some being a metaphor for a social habit. As such, they fit right into Coffee Talk’s reality-via-fantasy approach.
Dot Esports: The series has often used fantasy races to talk about prejudice, identity, family pressure, and social expectations. How did you approach that balance with yokai?
Anna Winterstein: In pretty much the same way! Japan has its own flavour of all the issues you describe, and we wanted them to remain core to the game’s stories. When deciding which yokai we’d use for our character cast, we constantly went back and forth to look at our themes and figure out which aspect of lore would shed new light on them; and in return, we sometimes took inspiration from lore we found to expand our themes.
Dot Esports: The barista doesn’t fix people’s lives, this has been a core tenet in Coffee Talk and many other games in the same genre. They listen, remember, and serve the right drink. Was it tempting to make the player more active in Tokyo, or was restraint still a key rule?
Anna Winterstein: The Barista is often instrumental in helping customers with a well-timed intervention, and of course, with the right drinks, but ultimately, the world has to exist in its own right outside our influence. The Tokyo Barista is, in many ways, similar to the Seattle Barista, though perhaps their voice has shifted a little to match the new surroundings!
Dot Esports: Fuzuki-san, you have a background in amateur kickboxing, which is almost comically different from the image of Coffee Talk with warm drinks, soft music, and late conversations. Is there an invisible connection between the two in your life?
Fuzuki Ninomiya: At first glance, kickboxing and Coffee Talk might seem like complete opposites. But for me, they actually share a surprising amount in common.
Kickboxing isn’t just about exchanging punches and kicks. It’s about distance, rhythm, breathing, and reading the atmosphere between me and my opponent. I try to sense what the other person is thinking and what kind of condition they’re in. At its core, there’s a deeply human feeling of truly facing another person.
Coffee Talk is similar in that sense. It’s not about forcing someone to change, but first listening to them and trying to understand who they are.
Personally, whether it’s at a gym or in a café, I believe there’s real value in places where people feel safe enough to lower their guard a little and speak honestly. So in my mind, these two worlds aren’t actually that far apart.
Dot Esports: You’re making a game about giving people a safe place to lower their guard, while kickboxing is literally about keeping your guard up. Is there perhaps a contrast that is explored in the same vein in the game itself?
Fuzuki Ninomiya: It’s true that kickboxing requires me to “keep my guard up.” But in reality, I can’t stay tense all the time. If I use too much force or stay stiff, I stop moving naturally, and I stop being able to truly see my opponent. That’s why the ability to relax, release tension, and find moments where I can breathe is actually very important.
In everyday life, people are constantly carrying something on their shoulders, and in many ways, they’re unconsciously keeping their guard up all the time. But in this café, they can loosen that tension a little. Their problems may not completely disappear, but they can at least have a moment where they think, “Maybe I can do my best again tomorrow.”
That feeling overlaps with something I’ve personally experienced through continuing kickboxing. Training has become a way for me to breathe, reset, and take a break from the pressures of work.
Dot Esports: The original Coffee Talk was compared by many to VA-11 Hall-A because both games have you serve drinks, meet regular customers, and engage in conversation. When working on Tokyo, how conscious were you of that comparison, and did it inform any game design decisions?
Anna Winterstein: It’s true that the games have similar principles behind them! I would say, though, that working on Coffee Talk Tokyo, we didn’t so much look at inspiration in other games. There is now a solid blueprint for what a Coffee Talk entry feels like, which has been shaped by a mix of influences from some games, including VA-11 Hall-A, but also from other media such as TV (Midnight Diner was a major influence on the first game). If anything, and in a very loose way, one new inspiration for Coffee Talk Tokyo may be Her Story; the idea of a mechanic where figuring out the right keyword then leads to more content was instrumental in coming up with the new Tomodachill design (although, of course, to a much simpler extent than Her Story).
Dot Esports: VA-11 Hall-A, Coffee Talk, and similar games all use bartending or café work as a way to turn listening to others into gameplay. What do you think makes this structure so effective for interactive storytelling?
Anna Winterstein: In effect, brewing in Coffee Talk is a diegetic way to represent a choice system. The underlying systems aren’t miles away from choices made through lines of text on the screen, but replacing those with a mechanic coherent with the world and the story reduces the dissonance players may experience. Functionally, brewing has the double benefit of giving the player agency but also requiring that you understand your customer and pay attention to their story.
Add to that that bars and cafes are essentially liminal spaces: they belong to everyone who walks into them, and they make hearts-to-hearts between people who are acquainted but also surprising conversations between strangers equally possible.
In all of those, the Barista is a facilitator, someone who makes the space come together and, in some cases, moves the conversation along. That is exactly how the Barista functions in Coffee Talk: the player’s agency feels like a realistic embodiment of this life-like situation, while also allowing a first-row-seat view into the world of the game.
Dot Esports: Japan has a long history of visual novels, adventure games, and dating sims that are all about repeated conversations. Since Coffee Talk Tokyo is now set in Japan, did that history influence how you thought about the game?
Anna Winterstein: A little bit! The Coffee Talk format already owes quite a lot to that visual novel tradition; certainly, it can count as a visual novel in several respects. One new storyline we are leveraging in this game, which is a bit of a nod to the Japanese visual novel tradition, is a little on-screen romance developing between two characters. Of course, the Barista is here again very much a bystander, but it felt right to explore that topic in the Tokyo entry!
On another note, our end-credits illustrations were drawn by Moa Hato, who created the wonderful visual novel Hatoful Boyfriend; we were thrilled to collaborate with her and to add an extra nod to the visual novel tradition.
Dot Esports: Coffee Talk’s visual style has always been influenced by Japanese anime, manga, and retro visual novel aesthetics, even though the original game came from Indonesia and was set in Seattle. Does setting this new game in Tokyo change anything on this front? Will the elements perhaps become even more pronounced?
Anna Winterstein: We didn’t necessarily set out to lean into the anime aesthetics more this time round, but as we went on, it became quite clear that the influence is stronger than before! That is quite likely due to a mix of the new team members working on the game (our concept artist, cro_iz, is also a manga artist) and the characters we came up with.
Someone like Erika, a very young and expressive kitsune-mimi, warranted vivid animations that reflect her rapidly shifting joys and sorrows. The world as a whole has also been influenced by the atmosphere in Tokyo, which is rife with neon lights and bright colours. So it’s safe to say that Japanese visual inspirations are more pronounced in this entry!
Dot Esports: To add to this, there’s an interesting full-circle moment here: Coffee Talk was influenced by Japanese media and Japanese-style adventure games, and now Coffee Talk Tokyo brings the series to Japan. Was that something you thought about during development?
Anna Winterstein: Absolutely! As I mentioned above, the original games drew from the visual novel tradition of games, as well as from Midnight Diner (a Japanese TV show). It felt like a full-circle moment to now set the game in Japan, and it was a part of why Tokyo emerged as such an obvious choice for a spin-off.
Dot Esports: How do you avoid making Tokyo feel like a stereotypical version of Japan, especially in a cosy game where the atmosphere is such a big selling point?
Anna Winterstein: Quite simply, we’ve tried to root the game in personal knowledge of Japan as much as possible. Everyone on the team has some level of understanding of that country; one writer and most of the artists and producers are Japanese, another writer lived in the country for years, and I’ve visited it several times and have been studying the language (very much a work in progress!)
We absolutely wanted to do justice to the country’s texture and complexity. Not only are we coming at this from a place of respect, but we also all believe that by being as true as possible to the specifics of a place and a time, you actually stand a better chance at telling compelling universal stories. We can only hope that we’ve succeeded on both fronts!
Dot Esports: Did you approach the new cast as spiritual successors to the Coffee Talk archetypes, or did you actively try to avoid direct replacements for characters from the first two games?
Anna Winterstein: We definitely didn’t want to repeat the previous storylines. The original Coffee Talk’s characters have their own identity and narratives, and creating a spin-off, we wanted to make sure we had something new to bring to the table. At the same time, it wouldn’t have been possible to have no similarities at all; but much like with real people, we hope that even if some characters end up sharing personality traits, they feel distinct in the players’ minds, with their own voices, quirks, and stakes.
Dot Esports: For many players, Coffee Talk is comfort food, but it’s not just that. It deals with loneliness, discrimination, relationships, regret, and many other difficult topics. How do you decide how heavy the story can get without breaking the café’s warmth and coziness?
Anna Winterstein: That balance is one of the main challenges that’s always at the forefront of our minds, making a game like that. While we don’t want to sugarcoat complex personal and societal issues, we also want players to leave the game feeling relieved, not burdened further.
Ultimately, we’ve tried as much as possible to take serious topics seriously and explore them in depth, while offering outcomes that feel both uplifting and earned. Some of our characters in this entry go through heavy situations, dealing with grief or health challenges, and we’ve tried to write about their difficulties, but also about the joy, warmth, and community that can still be found, even in hard times.
Dot Esports: To add to that, what does “cosy” mean to you in Coffee Talk Tokyo? Is it mainly the mood and presentation, the philosophy of how the game treats people, or something else entirely?
Anna Winterstein: It’s a little bit of all you’ve said! For us, the fundamental principle at the core of cosy games is that they don’t thrive on spectacular conflict or rapid twists. They move at a gentler pace and allow players to relax while playing them. At the same time, that doesn’t mean a cosy game can’t be meaningful, and in some ways, even taxing; but kindness must remain at the core of the experience, and that’s what we’ve tried to foster, in our own ways.
Dot Esports: Mohammad Fahmi’s voice is a major part of why the first Coffee Talk resonated with so many people. When continuing the series after his passing, how do you balance respect for that legacy with the need to make something that has its own voice?
Fuzuki Ninomiya: When I first encountered Coffee Talk, I also met Fahmi for the first time. After that, we worked together in many different ways — attending events together, working on the Japanese localization, and even having me act as an interpreter during interviews.
Because of that, while working on Coffee Talk Tokyo, one thought was always in the back of my mind: “Would Fahmi be happy to see this?”
Of course, I don’t think it’s possible — or even right — to try to perfectly recreate his sensibilities or his exact voice. Coffee Talk is a very important work that Fahmi created, but at the same time, it has also become a series that is loved and carried forward by many fans.
That’s why, rather than trying to imitate the surface of the original games, we wanted to preserve the kindness at the heart of Coffee Talk — the idea of listening to someone’s story, and the belief that even if you can’t completely solve a person’s problems, simply being there for them can still help in some way.
At the same time, we also wanted Coffee Talk Tokyo to have its own voice and themes as a story shaped by a new city, a new cast of characters, and a different era.
Rather than simply repeating the past, I believe Coffee Talk Tokyo is our way of carrying forward what Fahmi left behind while creating the kind of Coffee Talk that only we, and only this moment in time, could make.
Dot Esports: After the players finish Coffee Talk Tokyo, what do you hope they feel about this version of Tokyo, and about the series as a whole?
Anna Winterstein: For the players who are already familiar with the games, we hope they feel that Tokyo is a worthy addition to the series! For people who are new to the Coffee Talk world, we hope it makes them want to explore the original games. In both cases, of course, we hope they enjoy the game, and in particular, that they find something that moves them, uplifts them, or makes them feel seen, and ultimately, makes their day a little bit better!
