The Making Of...
Visual and novel: the story behind a bittersweet and distinctively Australian brew
How Route 59 added a shot of urban Australian flavour to its smooth visual novel Necrobarista
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.
The motivation behind making a visual novel with such a keen focus on visuals wasn’t simply about wanting to stand out from the crowd; as Chen notes with a wry smile, “There are much cheaper ways we could have done that.” Vu, Liu and he were all fans of narrative-led games and, self-admittedly flushed with the confidence of youth, believed they could push the boundaries of genre. That became particularly evident when Kotaku published an article based on an interview with Chen, headlined ‘Undead Cafe Game Necrobarista Was Made Out Of Frustration With The State Of Anime’. “When that came out, I was like, ‘Oh, crap,’” Chen admits. “But that’s how things were. I guess you could call it cockiness, but also a bit of frustration.”
There was a desire, too, to represent Australia – and not the version we’ve become accustomed to seeing in videogames. “There have been attempts at representing different parts of Australian wildlife, some more successful than others – like Paperbark, for example, is wonderful,” lead writer Damon Reece tells us (later, we’ll play Paper House’s short but sweet adventure about a hungry wombat and find ourselves agreeing with them). “But, you know, games set in urban Australia are extremely rare. And games set in urban Australia that are very distinctly Australian are even rarer,” they say.
That’s apparent in the prototypes of the game Route 59 supplies us with to try out. Even in the early stages, its presentation – cinematic in the true sense of the word, as opposed to the synonym for ‘expensively good-looking’ it has become in some quarters – stands out. Likewise, its focus on micro-narratives adjacent to the main story, in which you’re able to click on items and other characters for amusing background detail. Though rough-hewn, there’s plenty of evidence of the team’s talent for visual storytelling. Yet between the publication of that Kotaku interview and the original release date, Chen and company realised they were stuck: the central narrative wasn’t quite working. Three years into production of the game, the studio realised it needed someone to look at it with fresh eyes.
Enter Reece, who came on board to give the story a “soft reboot”. The coffee-house setting was in place, as was the central cast: new owner Maddy, her mentor Chay, young engineer Ashley, and troubled patron Kishan. As, for that matter, was Australian folk hero Ned Kelly, here reinvented as The Terminal’s gentlenatured enforcer. “Coming in, I knew pretty roughly what I wanted to do with it,” Reece says, though they say the process was anything but ordinary. Their arrival at this relatively late stage meant the schedule was tight: Reece’s words would be “given a going over by an editor and then put straight into the game,” they say. And it took a little while for them to adapt: if you’ve played the game, you may note that the early chapters have more narration than the later ones. “I felt like overusing narration in such a visual medium would be such a waste of its potential. That was something I grew into as I was going through,” Reece says.
Their script was written very differently from a standard videogame; rather, it was more like a play, with plenty of stage directions. “As an example, there’s an early scene where Kishan orders a horrible, horrible drink. And the way
“GAMES SET IN URBAN AUSTRALIA THAT ARE VERY DISTINCTLY AUSTRALIAN ARE EXTREMELY RARE”
that text is laid out on screen is actually how it’s laid out on the page,” they say. “I wanted to require as little back and forth as possible, not because I don’t want to talk to people, but just because it makes everyone’s jobs easier if they’re not having to constantly ask me, like, ‘What was your intention here?’” Their script, then, was more than just dialogue; Reece would suggest everything from individual facial expressions to ideas for camera shots. Not that every idea was used; some compromises had to be made, particularly with regard to a planned scene near the end. “When Kishan and Ned return to the café, I originally wanted to have them arriving in a Datsun sports car, Back To The Future style, with the flaming tyre tracks,” Reece laughs. “But that was not in budget.”
Even if their recommendations weren’t ultimately used, Reece’s extra direction proved helpful. “It gives a really solid idea of my intention for what’s happening with the narrative.” And, for that matter, the characterisation. Developing Necrobarista’s conflicted protagonist in particular proved cathartic for its lead writer. “I came into Necrobarista relatively messed up from a different gig, which went pretty poorly for complex reasons,” they say. “And I was like, ‘What would it be like to write a game with a character who is traumatised but does not want to engage with it?'” While many of Maddy’s qualities make her a likeable lead – and her problems a relatable one – she’s anything but a conventional videogame hero. After all, she’s effectively condemned her mentor to an enforced limbo, long after he’s accepted it’s his time to pass on. “She’s committed quite a ghastly crime against her friend, right? Like, Chay is only sticking around because she’s kind of forcing him to,” Reece says. “So I was fascinated in the dynamic of, OK, here’s your main character – she’s fun and she’s snarky, she’s got this amazing character design, she’s really cool. You know, she’s like the millennial dream. But also, she has done a horrible thing. She feels terribly guilty about it. But she’s too close to it to properly process it.”
That might make Necrobarista sound awfully heavy going. Yet for a game that is, at heart, all about the struggle to process the emotions surrounding death, it’s often laugh-outloud funny, boasting a streak of mordant wit that Reece says is quintessentially Australian: “Yeah, it’s the gallows humour, but also the stoicism, I
think.” It’s economical, too, we note – granted, the fact that you’re not reading static screens of text helps with the pacing, but the script is relatively lean by genre standards. “The one thing that was really important to me coming into the project was to not write it like a traditional visual novel. And I’ve played a good number of 200,000-word behemoths, and those are fine. But I would hate to have someone look at my work and think, ‘Wow, that was translated really faithfully from the original Japanese,’” they laugh. Why? “Because that sort of work tends to have a very specific feel to it, and I’m very glad to have had the opportunity to write something very faithful to what I know that reflects my surroundings and the surroundings of my friends.”
One side-effect of that, however, was that certain references and cultural nuances were misunderstood by some critics, despite the wry footnotes for many of the game’s culturally specific terms and fantastical conceits. (And not just critics: in a Medium blog addressing the Americanisation of popular culture, Reece notes that a reference to an Australian postcode caused one player to mistakenly think the game was set 1,000 years in the future.) “People missing the subtlety in it is kind of a bummer,” they sigh. “But I would much rather have that than have this invisible Netflix executive hanging over my shoulder, being all, ‘You need to make this for the Americans!’”
Indeed, Reece says towards the end of the script, they had Bennett Foddy’s description of masocore climbing game Getting Over It (‘I created this game for a certain kind of person. To hurt them’) at the forefront of their minds. Yet it hardly seems designed to upset or provoke; instead, its refreshing frankness about its subject matter makes it feel more honest than some of its peers. And its coda ensures that things conclude on a hopeful note. “To be very clear, I think there’s a lot of conversation to be had about the responsibility of particularly narrative designers in preparing people for difficult topics and then providing that aftercare – which is the entire point of the epilogue,” they elaborate. “Everything’s not OK now, but it’s going to be. Like, I want to hurt people, but I don’t want to hurt people.”
The response suggests the opposite. Several players have messaged to say the game has helped them come to terms with grief, even if Reece admits, “I didn’t intentionally go in writing it as a hashtag-death-positive game.” And with one story expansion released since launch and more on the way, it’s clear it’s found an audience beyond the traditional visual-novel niche. “In retrospect, you know, I can safely say that anime is OK,” Chen says, provoking a roar of laughter from Reece. “But I’m glad that we did this thing. I’m not going to say that we changed the landscape forever or everything, but I think it did show to a few people that more things are possible inside the genre.” Necrobarista’s success is a testament to Route 59’s adventurousness, and underlines a lesson its story makes clear. None of us knows how long we have until it’s our time to visit The Terminal, so why not live boldly?