With such an established format as the visual novel, games now quite often look to break outside of the text-heavy storytelling with snippets of other gameplay genres  that help break up the monotony of tapping endlessly through often unvoiced dialogue. Some of my favourite games of this style, VA-11 HALL-A and Coffee Talk, let you mix drinks and brew beverages between conversations, and that blend of interaction creates such a unique connection with the game and it’s characters. Tavern Talk takes that formula and steeps it in high-fantasy, but with a uniquely modern and tabletop-inspired voice that makes it one of the most unique takes on a Dungeons & Dragons style setting I’ve seen in gaming.

In Tavern Talk, your humble inn and drinkery serves as a hub for adventurers, warriors, and pretty much anyone else to gather at. Some are looking for rest after a tough battle, others are sharing quests they need party members for, and a few just need a refreshing beverage and someone to talk to.

On the surface, a lot of these characters are pretty standard fantasy stereotypes – your pale blonde elves, your stout dwarf warriors, your aloof assassins and so on – but what makes all of them so interesting is that they aren’t characterised and written like typically stoic fantasy heroes. Instead, their casual tone and quite literal adherence to things like the D&D alignment chart make them feel more like a real persons tabletop character mid-session. It helps them come to life in a much more interesting fashion, and leads to fun moments where you might see two characters with very different personalities instantly connect on a subject because of their placements on the alignment chart – you can even check this in-game through your journal.

When one of these characters visits your shop, they’ll ask you to make a drink for them. On top of general preferences for flavour or style, your patrons will also have stat-related needs that your concoction has to help with, requiring you to brew something that boosts strength, charisma, dexterity, intelligence, or defence.

The act of brewing a beverage isn’t very complicated, and I have mixed feelings about that. On one hand, the simplistic nature of the drink-mixing gameplay makes it easier to vibe with the story and follow it without interruption, but on the other hand, it gets so repetitive so quickly. Despite unlocking new recipes drink modifiers as the game goes on, your patrons will almost always stick to their same usual favourites. A more challenging version of the drink mixing would make your bond with the patrons and the info and rumors they share with you feel so much more earned and meaningful.

Once you learn enough info or rumours from various patrons, you can piece them together and post an open quest on your taverns’ quest-board to let any of your patrons tackle the adventure. This also isn’t as difficult or open-ended as I would have liked. There isn’t a lot of variety or meaningful experimentation that goes into putting these quests, or the drinks your patrons need before tackling them, together. The idea of your interactions with your shop visitors culminating in these big quests is interesting, but it already lacks some oomph since you don’t get to witness the quests at all – the lack of challenge in putting them together makes the most impactful moments of the game fall a bit flat.

Still, there’s a lot of charm and wonderful world-building to Tavern Talk that make it a worthwhile experience despite a lack of gameplay depth. The game is full of diverse, interesting, and engaging characters, and even the patrons who I despised for their rancid vibes or twisted personalities made for really interesting interactions. The world needs more drink-mixing visual novels, and Tavern Talk is a welcome, if slightly flawed, addition to that niche subgenre.

There’s a minimalist approach to storytelling that a lot of metroidvania games traditionally take, letting their world speak for itself and typically telling the rest of the story through text boxes and an occasional character sprite. Frontier Hunter: Erza’s Wheel of Fortune aims for loftier narrative goals with a load of fully animated cutscenes that place the characters and their adventures on equal footing with the importance of the side-scrolling exploration and action. Unfortunately, these moments are so rough and shoddy that they ultimately bring an otherwise decent gaming experience down several notches.

Frontier Hunter: Erza’s Wheel of Fortune is a mish-mash of fantasy and sci-fi tropes run through an anime filter, and that grab bag honestly leads to some interesting ideas. Your protagonist is Erza, an Imperial Hunter aboard a cruising skyship heading to an unexplored region. Despite her calm & cool appearance, her introductory cutscene has her livestreaming from her bedroom about planet ecology to her fans and getting embarrassed when her dad shows up in the stream chat. Alongside her, you also get to play as minigun-wielding and Erza-obsessed fangirl Ciara as well as masked fighter Nia.

Hot-swapping between three playable characters at any time adds a lot of fun new layers to the metroidvania action that I was really impressed by. Each character has their own specialisation, and plenty of new weapons to equip and abilities to unlock that help diversify their playstyles even more.

I struggled to lose myself in the fun of these characters and the multi-biome sprawling map they explore, though, because of how frequently the game comes to a halt to dish out an unremarkable cutscene. While character models in Frontier Hunter: Erza’s Wheel of Fortune look fine enough from afar, they’re much less impressive to look at in dynamic, close-up cutscenes, and their animation is distractingly robotic. It’s hard enough to care about these moments when they look so rough, but a lot of the writing in them isn’t anything memorable either – for some players, the heavy reliance on goofy and fanservice-y anime tropes in these scenes won’t do them any favours either.

Lackluster cutscenes aside, there’s a comfortable, cheesy charm to Frontier Hunter: Erza’s Wheel of Fortune that I really do appreciate. Attack animations are far sharper than what you witness in story scenes, and while some of them lack weight or oomph, the sheer volley of wild particle effects and glowing projectiles that sputter out every time you land an attack or dish out a super move are just fun as hell.

Plus, the wealth of customisation in the game really helps make it worth seeing things through to the end – from equipment-enhancing orbs dropped by enemies to new abilities that grant access to locked parts of the map, and even a huge variety of costumes for each character, it always feels like you’re unlocking something new and shiny that helps keep your attention even through the lowest points of the game.

Frontier Hunter: Erza’s Wheel of Fortune isn’t setting a new bar for metroidvanias by any means – but it’s gaming comfort food that’ll feel easy to sink your teeth into if you’re a fan of that kind of atmosphere. Even the most patient of corny game enthusiasts will likely be put off by how frequent, unpolished, and often unskippable the cutscenes in this game are though.