Talk to Strangers

Genre: Graphic Adventure / Visual Novel

Players: 1

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Review:

Talk to Strangers is a game with Graphic Adventure and Visual Novel elements released on PC in 2019 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2023. This game puts players in the role of a door-to-door salesman working for a greedy corporation posing as a caring, friendly company (and also it might be a front for a cult?). Players must make conversation choices that will hopefully lead to a sale while also managing their rage and depression and keeping track of time and money. Oh, what are you selling? Dunno, the game doesn’t seem to care about that so much.

It may sound like a jumbled mix of elements, but much of the time this works out to trial and error as you try to judge the right things to say for each different customer. You can approach houses at different times of day, and each one may be easier or more difficult to sell to at different times. You can also find yourself face-to-face with a nonstandard ending, such as walking up to your boss’s house and angering them so much they fire you on the spot, or getting into a dangerous situation at one of the sketchier houses you approach.

While normally, trial-and-error gameplay is something I dread in a game, Talk to Strangers makes this less tedious in various ways. The first is by keeping notes from one playthrough to the next reminding players what works and what doesn’t, allowing you to more easily breeze through repeat attempts without struggling to memorize everything. The other way this game manages to keep your interest across multiple playthroughs is the excellent writing.

The various people and situations you run into are delightfully varied, often silly, and make for some fun hijinks. You’ll meet an accident-prone guy who manages to keep finding increasingly more dangerous distractions as you try to sell to him, a wealthy woman who is clearly more drunk the later in the day you visit, and a grandpa who seems to need to run all his decisions by his daughter. What’s more, the wonderfully cynical nature of your own speaking options, and the thinly-veiled disregard of your employer all make for a wonderful bit of satire.

The rest of the presentation is similarly wonderful, with some colorful, cartoony, roughly-scrawled visuals that accentuate the cartoonish situations you often find yourself in, backed by a relaxed synthesized soundtrack that does a good job underlining the friendly pretense you put on as a front to your customers.

Overall, I think Talk to Strangers  manages to succeed at what it’s attempting largely through its good writing and great personality. Fans of Graphic Adventure and Visual Novel-style games who are curious about a game that has you trying to sweet-talk your way into sales with various oddball customers will find this game will likely exceed your expectations, and the $5 price tag makes this even more appealing. Definitely worth a look!

tl;dr – Talk to Strangers is a game that mixes Graphic Adventure and Visual Novel elements in a scenario that has players in the role of a door-to-door salesman trying to find the right things to say to convince prospective customers to buy their (unnamed) products. The trial-and-error nature of the conversation choices isn’t quite as bad as you might expect, and the game more than makes up for any repetition by having some genuinely good writing with lots of character and delightfully silly situations. For only $5, this is well worth a look.

Grade: B

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2023 Game Awards:

Runner-Up: Funniest Game

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