Do you love crime games and cocktails? Well, do I have a game for you. Best Served Cold is a visual novel where you solve crimes as a bartender in a 1920s speakeasy.
I must admit, when this pitch came across my desk, I immediately wanted to play the game. Historical setting. Tick! Noir mysteries. Tick! Cocktails. Tick! The games I’ve written are all historical mysteries with complex player characters, and I’m quite partial to a good cocktail. So it’s no wonder I enjoyed this.
Crime is afoot in the town of Bukovie, and you’re the bartender of the only speakeasy left in a time of prohibition. Of course, you can’t just do an honest day’s work. Straight-shooting Detective Hugo Mertens blackmails you to help solve crimes. Get the local patrons talking over a drink or two, and you might just solve five crimes over around 12 hours. That is, if you can find the incriminating clues.
I’m going to keep this review spoiler free, so you don’t need to worry about cracking the case too early.
Strong characterisation over cocktails
One of the best aspects of Best Served Cold is the strong characterisation. I really liked how the game wove the crimes around the characters; you might encounter an NPC as a customer in one chapter, who is involved in a crime in another. This allowed you to build a relationship with them and provided greater motivation to solve the crimes because you cared about them.
As a bartender, you watch these characters develop over the game, and you have the power to influence their decisions. Where one character starts as a dilettante mummy’s boy, he grows into someone completely different by the end of the game. They’re also complex characters. The owner of the bar, Vincent Flores, is a kindly bookseller, but don’t get him started on the topic of Tsaran nationalism.
Each NPC has their own motivations, voice and relationships with people in the bar. And while you can start a romance with some if you get your relationship status high enough, it feels a little tacked on in the late game to fulfil the expectations of the genre. It’s more fun watching NPCs pair off and start romances of their own. These relationships are not clear cut, and this complexity made the characterisation all the better for it.
Perhaps one of the frustrating things – although accurate for bartenders – was having to please the customer when they were saying things you didn’t agree with. Flores felt like that one relative you love, except when they get caught up on a conservative rant. Other characters express a diversity of opinions on gender and particularly, women. There’s a fraught balance between expressing your opinion as the bartender and building up relationships with the characters.
Cocktail making simulator vs visual novel: game mechanics
Best Served Cold sits squarely in the visual novel category. If you were coming to play a drink mixing game, you’d be disappointed. Mixing cocktails is very simple: drag the mouse around a pattern to beat the red timer. It’s nearly impossible to fail (although fail I did because my cat moved my cursor). You can also intentionally fail to mix a drink to put your customers in a bad mood. Best Served Cold is doing what it intends here – focussing on the story, with the drink mechanics as extra ‘flavour’. Despite this, I would have loved to see more complexity in the drink mixing.
Thankfully, Best Served Cold is a much better crime game than a cocktail making simulator. You gather clues by getting the NPCs to open up over a drink or two. I appreciate the logic here; some people spill everything when they’re soused, some are more guarded. You’ll also need to build up their relationships over time; the more they trust you, the more likely they are to tell you their secrets. And finding their favourite drink is key to this success. Disappointingly, my favourite cocktail, the Old Fashioned, is not on the menu. So you’ll get no secrets from me…
After gathering clues, you take what you’ve learned in the bar back to your room to combine clues to bring them back to the bar the next day. The peril of this kind of mechanic is that you might feel you’re just matching for the sake of matching things. The detective aspects of the game could have been improved by adding complexity to this mechanic. Including logic puzzles or codes to figure out along the way would have handed the player more agency in solving these crimes.
But the simplicity is helpful if you get stuck – pull out your entire crime solving pinboard and match things you haven’t before. I felt that the clues that needed to be matched were fairly organic, although not finding all of them in many of the chapters left me wondering what I’d missed. Perhaps I’m not as good of a detective as I thought…
As a minor issue, the conceit of being a game in a single location has its flaws. You need to look past why a criminal would keep coming back to the bar when you’ve figured them out. But it’s a nifty way to keep the game contained and within budget.
Solve the crime, do the time: Best Served Cold’s plot
The game is strongest when the characters in the bar have something to lose from a failed investigation, and when there are multiple suspects in the bar. The first two chapters have intriguing mysteries that will take you time to sort out the clues and solve the mystery. You’ll feel immensely satisfied when you track down the real culprit, after batting away a few red herrings.
The best chapters take inspiration from classic crime stories to create an original mystery. Unfortunately, as much as I loved the flamboyant characters of the theatre mystery, it’s similar to a plot I’ve seen before. I enjoyed it because of the characters, but I saw the ending coming.
While Chapter Four: The Crucible had the strongest motivation to solve the crime, the structure of the investigation means that you’re railroaded into a certain outcome. I applaud the writers did something different with the structure of this mystery, but also felt frustrated that most of the people in the bar had nothing to add to the criminal investigation. I often rang the bell for last drinks without exhausting the dialogue.
The last chapter is possibly the best, bringing all the threads together. Just when I thought I had it figured out, the ending caught me by surprise. It was a clever way to wrap up the story, but I won’t spoil it for you here.
In a good way, Best Served Cold feels like an investigative board game. Each crime takes around 2-3 hours to solve, so I’d strongly recommend taking your time with it. Savour each chapter like a great cocktail, best sipped slowly over several weeks. While it’s not a perfect bartender simulator, if you enjoy character-driven visual novels with a historical twist, I’d recommend Best Served Cold.
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