Developer: Rogueside Games
Publisher: Rogueside Games
Platforms: Switch, PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S
Tested on: PC
Best Served Cold – Review
What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the words ‘best served cold’? There’s a good chance that your answer is ‘revenge’, although ‘drinks’ is also a contender. In this regard, Rogueside Games’ visual novel Best Served Cold is off to a great start, as the title covers both bases. Of course, a clever title alone isn’t enough to warrant adding a game to your library. Can Best Served Cold mix up a good time, or were we left with a hangover?
Story
Set in the fictional European town of Bukovie, Best Served Cold presents you with a series of murders to solve. The first case, which doubles as an extended tutorial, places you behind the counter of The Nightcap, a speakeasy. It’s the 1920s, and the town is under prohibition, so your job as a bartender isn’t exactly legal. A string of murders near speakeasies brings police officer Hugo Mertens to The Nightcap. Mertens uses both your criminal past and your current job as leverage, forcing you to help him solve the murder of a young woman in exchange for keeping the illegal bar open. Of course, it doesn’t end with that first murder, and you’ll end up assisting Mertens across a series of interconnected murder cases, using your charisma, conversational skills, and mixology.
With any visual novel, the writing is the most important aspect, and we’re happy to say that Best Served Cold gets this right. The mysteries are compelling, and the cast is very likable. There are some minor areas where the game drops the ball when it comes to historical accuracy and applies modern sensibilities to the mindsets of the cast, but given the overall quality of the writing, we’re more than okay with that. This is a universe where a primitive computer and a rudimentary mobile phone make appearances, so it’s not too much of a stretch to see that the cast doesn’t blink twice at same-sex relationships or non-binary characters. The game does touch on social issues like racism and misogyny, but it does so with a progressive approach rather than with historical matter-of-factness.
Graphics
The real-life 1920s were the era when art deco flourished in Europe. Best Served Cold fully embraces this, resulting in a stylish-looking game. The hand-drawn character designs have a lot of personality to them. This is necessary, as animation is very limited, resembling motion comics more than anything during the few cutscenes that are in the game. Unfortunately, Best Served Cold doesn’t avoid a common visual novel pitfall: there are too few different character portraits to cover every possible emotion that comes up in dialogues.
Sound
Where Best Served Cold sticks to the visual greatness of the 1920s, it doesn’t approach its audio with the same mindset. The soundtrack is less ‘roaring twenties’ and more ‘generic tunes’. There is no voice acting, which is understandable given the sheer amount of dialogue here, but given the character-driven nature of the game, we’d have liked to have seen this at least for key phrases or in cutscenes.
Gameplay
While Best Served Cold may be a visual novel first and foremost, there are plenty of interactive elements here to set it apart from straightforward genre entries like Find Love or Die Trying or Sol Dorado Heist. Instead, Best Served Cold occupies a similar niche as the Ace Attorney and Famicom Detective Club games, where you still spend the vast majority of your time reading, but you’re also gathering clues and piecing evidence together using your own sense of logic. Best Served Cold also adds mixing drinks to this, resulting in a game that is probably best described as Ace Attorney meets Coffee Talk.
Each of the cases follows a similar structure. A short black-and-white cutscene sets up the murder, after which you are taken to The Nightcap. The police provide you with a list of suspects, and it’s up to you to uncover the truth. You’ll need to talk to speakeasy patrons to obtain clues to this, although your clientele isn’t always as loose-lipped as you’d want. Pouring customers’ drinks helps here, as the right cocktail will improve their moods and make them more talkative. You need to be careful not to give them too much though, as they may become inebriated, and drunken slurs aren’t exactly good grounds for compelling clues. At the end of each shift, you’ll return to your apartment, where the clues you gathered can be pinned together on a board with red string, creating connections and hopefully discovering new layers. Eventually, you’ll either have pulled the right strings and gathered the needed evidence to incriminate a suspect, or time runs out, and it’s game over for The Nightcap.
The Nightcap has several regulars, and over time, you’ll build up a conversational relationship with them too, which in turn means that they’ll confide more sensitive information to you. It helps if you learn their preferred drinks too, and mix these perfectly. Mixing drinks is done by means of a simple microgame, where you need to use your mouse or joystick to slide a pointer over a series of nodes before a second pointer is able to catch you. The patterns formed by these nodes become increasingly more complex as you progress through the story, but the microgame never gets punishing. Your success here determines how well you’re able to mix a drink. Combined with how well your concoction matches the tastes of a customer, this is Best Served Cold’s main way of building up a good connection with patrons, as well as the number of dialogue actions you can perform. Having a surplus of these points lets you take more risks when making dialogue choices. This can also lead to amusing banter, and while not all of the dialogue is going to be relevant to the case, it does add a sense of depth and reality to your clientele.
In terms of overall gameplay, Best Served Cold doesn’t really bring anything to the table we haven’t seen done before elsewhere, although the way it blends individual elements keeps things fresh. We do recommend playing the game with a mouse and keyboard though, as we ran into some issues when playing with a controller. Sometimes, the text would skip mid-sentence, and we were unable to use the clue board with our controller too. None of these issues occurred when we switched to a mouse and keyboard setup. That said, drink mixing is easier with a controller, so hopefully, any controller issues are patched out before long.
Conclusion
The cocktail that Best Served Cold serves up may not be as perfect as those you mix in the game, but we’d happily drink it anyway. The clear winner here is the writing, in particular the way the mysteries unfold and the dialogues with regular customers. The visual presentation helps too, although Best Served Cold’s soundscape leaves a couple of things to be desired. The same can be said about controller inputs, although this is easily remedied by switching to a good old mouse and keyboard. If you like your murder mysteries with a side of rum, give Best Served Cold a shot. There’s a good chance you’ll end up liking it (and if you do, the next round of drinks is on you!)
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