VA-11 Hall-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action

I own this game on 2 platforms. I've played it 3 times. This game needs more attention. Despite the entire game taking place in a bar (and occasionally your apartment), the world of VA-11 Hall-A feels incredibly rich and vibrant. You learn what's happening to the city you live in by talking to the regulars everyday at work, and the dialogue is smart, funny, and full of personality. The best thing? No one asks you to save the world. No one expects you to storm some monolythic corporation's fortress to stop an evil scheme. You're just some rando working in a bar, struggling with your own problems in a dystopian future, and that's pretty damn cyberpunk.

In the marriage of gameplay and narrative, if one's lacklustre the other can keep you going. This is an ideal game to play for 30-60 minutes at a time for some relaxation. The characters are well realised, but unless you get personally invested there's not much to keep you engaged. It's a relaxing experience rather than anything engaging, and could have benefited by being half the length. By the 3 hour mark the mechanics had lost their charm, and I had to force myself to play because I wanted to know how it ended. A nice idea, but I don't think I'd ever pick up and play this again.

If you think you don't need human contact, this game will makes you change your mind. There's nice people outside, specially in a bar. Good luck :)

I didn't have any strong expectations coming into this, but it's effectively a visual novel with a drink mixing minigame. The graphics are great, the story is interesting but a little slow and scattered. The thing that killed this game for me was the painful drink mixing. Maybe it's because I was playing with a controller instead of a mouse, but it was so slow and unsatifsying to trudge through that aspect of the game, that about halfway through the game, the tedium of the mixing game overcame my curiosity about the story and I gave up on it.

I have good memories of this game, it's pretty much only conversations with the occasional drink mixing mechanics which should not in any way be neglected as the quality of service provided by the bartender (Jill) can affect her income. I remember having a lot of fun, playing this game in a drunken state so I could inmerse myself and forget about the stressful low paying job I had. I'd say the cholesterol problems such drinking habit caused me was worth it as I still have those memories with me.