When I
opened up Coffee
Date I
was pleasantly surprised by the improvement in Lamont Sanford's writing. However,
once I actually started playing the game I realised how that had been achieved. Although
it was written with Inform 7, Coffee Date is
essentially an HTML dating game. Lamont Sanford's games have never been text
heavy, but this decision trims things down even further. Less dialogue, fewer
actions, no object descriptions. Reducing the amount of text seems to have been
a key design goal, since it's reinforced in several other ways. For example, Coffee
Date is
heavily graphical (with around 650 images) and in several places images are
displayed instead of actually describing what’s occurring. Making all of the
NPC dialogue 'voiced' without subtitles means less onscreen text as well. The
results of the text-to-speech program used to generate the NPC voices are
mixed, to say the last, and the lack of subtitles creates accessibility issues.
However, less text means less to check and less to go wrong, hence the
improvement.
The plot
of Coffee
Date will
be familiar to anyone who's ever played an HTML dating game. An anonymous PC
goes on a blind date with a girl (called Heather in this game). If things go
well, the date continues and possibly ends with them getting horizontal. In
this case the date isn't completely blind, since Heather and the PC have
exchanged messages on a dating website, which is a plausible way to set things
up. However, it's unclear what they talked about since they start the date
unaware of basic facts about each other. Unlike the other HTML dating games
that I've played, where the idea of forming a lasting relationship with the
female lead is either left open or is the entire point of the game, Heather
explicitly states that she is not looking for anything serious. Despite that,
the bulk of the game involves Heather and the PC enjoying typical dating
activities as though they were going to embark on some sort of relationship. Any
hope of that is averted by the 'good' ending, where Heather and the PC have sex
and she kicks him out of her house immediately afterwards. The epilogue states
that they have sex on several other occasions, but beyond that their
relationship seems to be non-existent. All of which begs the question, if the
only thing Heather wanted was sex, why did she and the PC go through the whole
rigmarole of dating (twice)?
The
gameplay of Coffee Date can best be
described as multiple-choice. About a quarter of the options are obviously
wrong, but making an informed choice between the others is next to impossible.
All of Heather's lines are delivered in a robotic monotone, so it's often
difficult for the player to assess how well one particular option was received
compared to another. On top of that, UNDO is disabled and there's no way to
save a game in progress. Consequently, working out what the 'best' answers are
involves a lot of laborious trial and error, not to mention uncertainty. Does
Heather react better to a hug or a handshake? Would she respond
well to being kissed at this point? Who knows? Coffee
Date is
crying out for some sort of scoring system that would allow players to make
those kinds of distinctions. There are general indications of how well the date
is going overall (such as Heather deciding to read the PC's palm at the cafe),
but due to the limited amount of description I felt like I was fumbling in the
dark most of the time.
Like the
HTML dating games it most resembles, Coffee Date has a
branching plot. However, the branching is very superficial as it leads to the
same destination in the end. Due to the general lack of feedback, it's hard to
say if the decisions that cause the branching affect anything at all. For
example, does Heather prefer eating at a romantic Italian restaurant or going
for burgers? My best guess is that it doesn't matter, making it a cosmetic
decision that enables the player to personalise their playthrough. If that's
the case, it would be nice if the decision was at least referenced afterwards
to give it some sense of significance, but that doesn't happen either.
HTML
dating games live and die by their female lead, so what is Heather like? To be
honest, I found it hard to think of her as a living, breathing character
because she sounds like a robot. That’s a little unfair as she is given a few
background details, such as being from Manchester and having three siblings,
which make her a more believable character even though they’re irrelevant to the
game. The one relevant background element is that she broke up with her last
boyfriend two months ago, which explains why she's not looking for anything
serious now. However, it doesn't explain why she's dating so many men at once,
nor why she and the PC end up having a purely sexual relationship. Otherwise, there's
nothing particularly distinctive or memorable about Heather other than the
fact that she's a smoker (which is blessedly rare in AIF). Beyond that she's
just a stereotypical young person who likes to drink and party, and
occasionally take drugs. Oh, and she might be a porn star. I guess that's
interesting, but as far as I can tell there's no payoff to it other than
providing an excuse to wedge even more graphics into the game.
However,
the big problem I had with Heather was how little effort went into making her attractive
to the player. Heather is not looking for anything serious, so there is no emotional component to her relationship with the PC. That's fine
in the context of the purely physical relationship that Heather and the PC are
supposedly having, but there still needs to be *something* to make the player
interested in the sex scene. For example, emphasising Heather's sexual
attractiveness, or the fact that she's sexually attracted to the PC. A good
example of what I mean can be seen in Getting To Know Christine. In the
opening scene of that game, the player watches Christine strip down to her
underwear, and on their first date she teases the PC by inhaling a banana. From
the get go, there's no doubt that Christine is both a very sexy lady and
interested in the PC specifically. The closest Coffee
Date comes
to that is a very contrived spot where the wind blows up Heather's skirt (in
defiance of the laws of physics) and the PC (along with anyone else in the
cafe) gets to see her flowery underwear. The limited amount of text exacerbates
this problem. Heather and the PC do flirt, but the player isn’t told what they actually
say to each other so it has no real effect. On the rare occasions when Heather
does say something sexual, the fact that she sounds like a robot robs it of any
excitement (hearing her declare in a monotone that she wants to have Joseph
Gordon Levitt's babies is inadvertently hilarious though).
On the
technical side of things, Coffee Date runs
reasonably well, although both UNDO and save functionality had to be disabled
to achieve that. It still bugs out pretty regularly, producing error messages but
not actually breaking the game. There are also numerous typos (including in the
voiced parts from the sound of it), and several continuity errors. Given that Coffee
Date is
a CYOA game (something that wasn't mentioned in the announcement or the readme)
I would have preferred it if the text prompt had been removed from the start of
the game. As it was, I spent my first few turns trying and failing to examine
various objects in the café, which didn't make for a great first impression.
So when
all's said and done, did I actually enjoy Coffee Date? Kind of, I guess. There
was something about fighting through the opaque gameplay that appealed to my
masochistic side, and I got some satisfaction from reaching a sex scene on my
fourth playthrough (more than I got from the sex scene in all honesty).
However, the repetitiveness of the gameplay (as in having to repeat the game
over and over, since there's no save functionality) quickly wore out its
welcome. That said,
Coffee Date is not a terrible game, and it's certainly more
interesting than Return
to Pleasantville. But it does encapsulate why I find Lamont Sanford to be
such a frustrating author. He's clearly ambitious, and he puts a lot of work
into certain aspects of his games. Despite that he's either unwilling or unable
to put in the extra effort that's required to produce a bug-free and enjoyable
experience for the player. Overall, I'd describe Coffee
Date as
more of a sideways move for Lamont Sanford, as it minimises his weaknesses as
an author rather than overcoming them.