![]() Valhalla is clearly a game after Papers, Please’s heart: a game where the sole interaction you have with someone on the other side of a counter at your menial, boring job. This is explored a little bit, but accepted a little too quickly-perhaps there’s an interesting point about consent and appearance of age in there, but it’s not really addressed. Men and women talk about sexbots in a really creepy way, with one character talking about how he wants to check if they’re anatomically correct all over, and it’s made painfully clear that the one sexbot that comes into your bar is made to look between 10 and 13 years old. Perhaps this would be an interesting side to the story if the observations were challenged in some way, or made a clearer part of the characterisation of the more unscrupulous characters (like the untrustworthy and manipulative newspaper editor) but instead the female protagonist seems to shrug them off like vodka off a duck’s back.Īll the women talk to each other like they want to have sex right then and there, which might not be surprising from a game that describes itself as “waifu bartending”, but it’s not usually how women converse-sure, there are women who are hornier than the guy who has to taste-test Viagra, but statistically it’s not every woman you meet, and it can be a bit tiring to have everyone wanting to get in your pants. You can be listening to a conversation about how corrupt the press is, or the unethical treatment of robots, and it will effortlessly slip into some strangely casual and lascivious observations about tits and vaginas. On top of all of this is a strange, unpleasant lingering taste in your mouth about the tone of the game in general. It takes a while to understand that the difference between mixed and blended drinks is a matter of watching the lump of pixels that represents the cocktail shaker for five seconds more before serving, or that aging a drink is just a matter of clicking on the clock. The bartending aspect is also barely explained to you, and whether that’s part of the fun of figuring it out or just an assumption that the player has a basic knowledge of mixology is unclear. ![]() ![]() Sometimes those conversations are interesting and give you an insight into the gritty and corrupt world outside your saloon doors, but they really drag on when you have to click every two seconds. The game is reduced to what seems like endless clicking as the bar conversations drag on and on and on, displayed only ten to twenty words at a time on the screen. Remembering people’s favourites will also get you far, unlocking new conversation threads as you go.īut as interesting as it sounds, this process becomes dull and mechanical very early on. Someone asks for something bitter, and you search for “bitter” in the recipe list. Someone asks for something big, and you double the ingredients. Bartending is treated as a puzzle: someone asks, cryptically, for a cold drink, and you know to find something “on the rocks”.
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