Growing up, I despised coffee. I couldn’t understand the appeal of brown, bitter drinks or sugar-filled lattes – and figured I never would. A few years ago, though, being locked down during the spread of Covid led to me and my mother making coffee together every morning. What started as me sharing some of her brew quickly became a shared daily ritual, and now I can’t get enough of that bitter bean juice. My newfound love for coffee has helped me appreciate cafe-focused games like Coffee Talk, and now it’s helped pique my interest in Affogato – a game that promises to blend the cafe-running, customer-interacting thrill of a visual novel with the time management of Persona and a sprinkle of tower defense.
If this game were purely a visual novel, I would honestly be hooked. The characters immediately pull you in, with your protagonist Affogato being a sarcastic and seasoned witch who seems to be more focused on opening a successful coffee shop than she is on any dastardly witch-y affairs. Her pact-bound companion and familiar, Mephista the Archdemon, has all the haughty and overexcited energy of Power from Chainsaw Man, but none of her bite – leading to some really fun energy between the two. There are plenty of other fun characters to meet in Arorua City, too – and I found myself immediately excited to start spending my time bonding with them over Americanos and macchiatos.
There’s more to Affogato than just brewing beans and chatting with anime girls, though – you’ll soon end up being tasked with the much more witch-appropriate mission of defeating the demons trapped within the minds of various Arorua City citizens – and you won’t be doing so with dialogue choices or turn-based battles. Instead, Affogato throws you into a refreshingly unique reverse-tower-defense system for battles – missions present a small map of pathways and stationary enemies, and require you to summon and guide characters to the end of the map in order to defeat the boss demon and come out victorious.
Flirting with the theme of witches some more, your deployable characters are all based on various tarot cards – from Strength, to the Chariot, to the Hermit, and more. You’ll need to be incredibly precise about who you deploy and how you deploy them, though, as well as which paths you navigate them down. Each card has a summoning cost, and there are only certain ways to generate the points needed for summoning more – one unexpected death can lead to your entire run being ruined if you aren’t careful. Compared to other modern tower defense experiences, the missions in Affogato can definitely veer closer to puzzle territory. At times it feels like there’s only one correct solution to making it to the end in one piece, and you’ll have to suffer through a few deaths and retries in order to find that solution.
On top of that, these missions can take up time in your day – time that can be spent on various other activities. Each calendar day in Affogato consists of a morning at the cafe, and an evening of free time – free time which you can use to bond with characters, work another shift at the cafe, complete side-mission battles, or dig into your main quest tasks. Much like the modern Persona entries, some of your main quests will need to be completed before a certain calendar day – but if you stay ahead of things you can complete it well in advance of the deadline, giving you plenty of free time as a reward. It feels nice to have all that time to yourself, but it’s in those moments that you realize there isn’t nearly as much to do or as many conversations to have in this game as there are in Persona. Character events are limited, and while you can walk around the town freely, you don’t have much to see or do in said town.
Affogato manages a pretty engaging balance of visual novel, tower defense missions, character bonding and time-management. The scope of all of these various elements never reaches as high as the long, feature-rich JRPGs that have clearly inspired the game – but I would say that Affogato goes for a quality-over-quantity approach. There may not be many character events, but the ones that are there are memorable. And for as small of a game as it may be, it’s full of gorgeous art, rich voice acting, and addictive music. Don’t expect the next best RPG mega-adventure, but be prepared for an immediately addictive blend of tower defense and cafe management.
