"Lily Sticker", "Red Horned Triple Speed", "Red Comet", "Virtual Idol", "Astringent Female Anchor", "G Fat"...
Speaking of these words, I believe that all of you here can already produce pictures in the mind of the second thorn salamander, if you are not the second thorn salamander, then forgive the offense (soil seat).
They are the red mobile warriors soaring in the universe, the green-haired singers who interpret the "high-speed divine words" at a speed that humans cannot match, and the smiling fat people who will never count 3...
However, in this game, you can have an encounter with all of them at the same time.
In this game, you will play as a bartender who is a drinker who walks into a bar late at night.
The game I want to recommend to you today has a long name -
Cyberpunk Bartender Action
This game is a text adventure game made by Sukeban Games, "sukeban" means "bad big sister head" in Japanese, and this production team looks like a second-in-command salamander.
But the two members of the production team came from a place that was too far from heaven, too close to the United States, and had been a master of magic realism since ancient times— South America, specifically, from Venezuela.
When the Japanese ACGN meets Latin American magic realism, what kind of chemistry will occur?
I think this game gives us a good answer.
01
Relaxing midnight dessert
If you compare aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
The game is extremely lightweight, and the player only needs to click the mouse, or even use the keyboard.
There are also no options in this game to stop the heart, get a chill in the back, and click the save button in a trembling location before making a choice.
All in all, as the production team suggested, this is a mini-game that can be enjoyed while eating snacks and drinking Coke.
The player's main operation in the game is bartending. Guests who walk into the bar will order a glass of wine based on elements such as taste, style, and name.
Of course, if the player can remember the preferences of these regular customers and mix them with a specific glass of wine at the right time, they may encounter surprises.
After determining the wine ordered by the guest, the player only needs to press Tu Suo Ji, add the corresponding amount of 5 base wines to the sherk pot, and decide whether to age and add ice depending on the recipe.
Then, click "Modulation" to start shaking the Sherk pot, the shaking time is "modulation" within 5 seconds, and more than 5 seconds, the pot begins to shake violently is "reconciled".
As long as the ingredients are added correctly and the preparation method is correct, this glass of wine can be exchanged for a night talk, a story and a sales commission.
This game is lightweight not only in terms of operation, but also in the way it is presented.
The screen of this game is pixel style, and it is impossible to have dubbing, but players can choose the playlist that is looped in the bar to match their virtual nightlife with the most beautiful bgm.
Considering that these two producers can only survive on butter bibimbap, they have poured all their resources into this game to have the game as it is now.
Although the characters are a bit blurry in the eyes of the player and have never heard their voices, the game can still give the player a strong sense of immersion.
This is thanks to the game's clever fragmented narrative, which seems insignificant but constitutes a "sense of real life" in the player's experience.
In the game, Jill, the bartender who plays the role of bartender, works in a bar at night and returns to the stove of the rental house during the day.
Players can save here, they can also "swipe their phones", and you can even play mobile phones in computer games!
On the Internet forum, sand sculpture netizens talk about everything: from lily animation to current political news, and even players can see the discussion about the protagonist.
Jill also talks to her cat when she swipes her phone, a solitary way of acting out.
She can also choose to go out shopping, and she has something she wants to buy almost every day.
If the player does not buy it for her, she will be absent-minded when she works that night, unable to remember the request of the guest's order, and the player will have to concentrate on writing down the wine ordered by the guest.
Cyber Bartender is such a fantastic game, it is simple but not simple, with very limited resources, let us immerse ourselves in the fantasy world in the minds of the producers.
Just from the production of the game, I can feel the sincerity of these two independent producers.
02
Tongfu Inn in Cyber City
The fragmented narrative style of "Cyber Bartender" mentioned above reminds me of a classic comedy on the mainland, "The Legend of Wulin".
Cyber City in "Cyber Bartender" and Chivalrous Jianghu in "The Tale of Wulin", they are everywhere in the work, and we can peek at the leopard from the fragmentary information given by the characters.
However, the author does not give us the opportunity to look at this behemoth from God's perspective.
Dana, the manager of the bartender Jill, is a capable woman with a robotic arm who has a resounding nickname, "Red Comet."
There are various legends about her robotic arm, the most outrageous of which is that she won a crushing cyborg wrestler fight out of control and then had to be replaced by a robotic arm.
Your colleague Gill is a man full of secrets, and the store manager is always tapping on his side, exploring his past.
He just didn't say anything about the past, and willingly summoned the two of you women, and was called "always received" by the store manager.
The bar's drinkers are even more talented, and the editor-in-chief of the tabloids loves to order a big beer, sit down and nag you, spit on his employees, and angrily spray readers' taste for the news.
And his employee, fed up with his PUA, finally bravely resigned and started his new life.
The mysterious killer prefers bitter liquor, and it is difficult to see the killer's shadow in this silent and polite drinker.
The killer prefers this place because no one will make trouble on the territory of the "Red Comet", and he does not have to worry about being entangled in "work" here.
If you knock on the door of his heart with a suitable glass of wine, he will tell you a bitter killer story.
Also here for entertaining are the righteous "White Knights" and the detectives who inquire about the news, and in their words you can probably guess what is happening in the city.
Later, after days of gunfire, a mysterious bank robbery settled, and the "White Knight" who once exercised police authority in the city collapsed.
Lori's bionic humanity worker, the giant breast blonde hacker who specially replaced his hands with prosthetics, the riddle man trying to take you to break the fourth wall, the energetic singing bionic doll...
A small VA11 bar can accommodate the city's three religions and nine streams of characters.
After all, no matter who it is, it takes such a bar and such a slightly indebted bartender to entertain the long night.
When the player calls out one glass of wine after another in the game and hears one strange story after another from the mouths of different characters.
A grand picture of cyberspace slowly unfolds from the bar in this remote corner.
03
ACGN through the lens of magical reality
In "Cyber bartender", the second stingrays see many places, and they can get the stems buried by the producers of the same old second stingray.
For example, Mario, the motorcyclist who forced himself to drink spirits in order to dress up as a pure grandfather, his red motorcycle suit was like Kaneda coming out of "Akira".
Jill's ex-girlfriend's sister Gaby, when I first started watching this little girl, I didn't react yet, but I always felt that this eyebrow was inexplicably familiar.
Later, after seeing that she only said 2 and 4 in the dialogue, I suddenly understood everything, and it turned out that she was sexually fat.
The characters of "White Knight" Sei and Miss Stella pay homage to Ayapolis and Asuka in EVA.
Especially the battle-damaged version of Sei, the winding method of this bandage, is completely consistent with Ayabori.
There are also a huge number of WWE and "Metal Gear Solid" stems buried here, and I will not repeat them here.
I would say that while there are countless ACGN elements in Cyber bartender, it is completely different from the Japanese ACGN works we know.
We may wish to take the heroine Jill's lily as an example, in the Japanese ACGN, the lily has always been a popular element, but the Japanese lily is dominated by light hundred (that is, only to the step of sticking).
The heroine in the Japanese lily may be an opera girl on stage, a magical girl in battle, and of course an ordinary student.
They may face existential crises – fighting, competing, but none of these crises are tied to reality.
The biggest crisis in their relationship comes from the intervention of a third party, even though this third party is likely to be persecuted afterwards (laughs).
And Jill in "Cyber bartender", and his ex-girlfriend have almost reached the step of talking about marriage.
In Jill's recollection, the two or three things about a cucumber that happened when the two of them lived together, I wrote it here, and this article will not pass the review.
And the reason why they eventually broke up is also very realistic, just like many college couples who break up after graduation in reality.
The Japanese-style ACGN, or two-dimensional culture, is a culture rooted in thriving modern life.
Today's Japanese creators live in abundance almost as soon as they are born, without worrying about their lack of food and clothing, and have not experienced real suffering at all.
Transplanting such a culture to the soil of magic realism in Latin America, it is natural that "oranges are born in Huaibei is orange".
The creators of Cyber bartender can only survive on butter bibimbap, and the city where they live will occasionally have gunshots and people will fall down.
Living in such an environment, the works they create are also affected by the heavy gravitational pull of reality.
The challenge for the characters is no longer the metaphysical "apocalyptic crisis" of Witch Night, but the real-life rents, utilities, and choices for the future.
After I had fully experienced the whole process of the game and gained an in-depth understanding of the producers, I recalled their advice at the beginning of the game: it was recommended that players eat snacks and drink Coke easily.
I actually had a bit of a bitter feeling, hoping that they on the other side of the world could now have snacks to eat, fat house happy water to drink, preferably ice cold.
If you're a salamander like me, a "complex ingredient" with "a dna engraved with all sorts of weird stuff," then this Cyberpunk Bartender Action is definitely a game you won't want to miss.
I believe that you will fall in love with all kinds of drinkers in the game, just like me, and will also fall in love with Jill who has been dutifully carrying a camera for you.
At the same time, you can also feel each other with two makers in Venezuela, just like the new human being written by Yuki Tomino, across the distance between the northern hemisphere and the southern hemisphere.