We Should Talk.

Genre: Visual Novel

Players: 1

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Review:

We Should Talk. is a Visual Novel released of PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch in 2020. This game puts players in the role of a woman making a regular visit to a bar, where she’ll catch up with old friends and contend with advances from strangers, all while carrying on a conversation with her girlfriend via text.

The presentation here is not great. Characters are represented by fairly simple, somewhat ugly 3D models without much animation, with similarly simple backgrounds that are only slightly better thanks to how dark everything is. Characters here aren’t voiced, but everything is backed by a soundtrack that’s all over the place in style, and none of it is particularly good. So… not a good first impression.

When it comes to the text-based gameplay, this game at least comes at the genre with a good premise – players’ role in the conversations they have are determined not by choosing one of a selection of answers but by piecing together two or three parts of a response to form your answer. At least in theory, this gives players much more freedom to respond as they would like.

In practice, things don’t play out quite as well as this game aims for. Much of the time, your potential answers don’t seem to differ significantly from each other, and don’t seem to have any noticeable effect on the story. Additionally, for the most part, this game’s story doesn’t branch – each time you play through the game, you will always have the same series of questions asked of you, with only a few follow-up questions differing based on your answers.

And that of course leads to the question, how is the story itself? Well, to be honest, there’s not enough of it to be… anything, really. The entire game can be completed within 30 minutes, and while the point is clearly to play through the game multiple times, those repeat play-throughs will be so similar that it won’t bring much more to the table. You’ll talk with the barkeep, reminisce with an ex, flirt with or fend off the flirting of a stranger, and have a strained text conversation with your clingy girlfriend. Then in the end, based on how you answered questions, you’ll find out whether your character patched things up with her girlfriend, hit it off with one of the bar patrons, or perhaps some muddied version of both.

For such an ineffectual, bite-size experience, even the $7 price tag seems a bit high, and while this game’s conversation system holds a lot of potential if a more ambitious game were to take it and expand on it, I don’t think We Should Talk. provides players with much more than a novelty. If you’re curious to see an interesting mechanic in the Visual Novel genre, this game may be worth a look, but otherwise there’s just not much here to hold your interest.

tl;dr – We Should Talk. is a Visual Novel that has players having conversations with various bar patrons while texting with a clingy girlfriend. The conversation system in this game is interesting and has some potential, but the game doesn’t really do much with it, and this combined with the half-hour playtime means that this game has little value outside of being a curiosity.

Grade: C-

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