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I’ve always been a sucker for detective stories. Which is why Best Served Cold attracted me from the start. A game where you play a bartender solving murders? Sign me up. To be totally honest, the first thing that attracted me to the game was the art style. The beautiful character art combined with the idea that you’d get to know these people and their deepest darkest secrets is actually what hooked me.
Best Served Cold is a murder-mystery detective visual novel where you play as a bartender during the Prohibition era in an alternate universe Europe, in a country that is most likely Romania. I guessed this because some characters have Romanian names, one of them used a Romanian word once, and the currency in the country is unique only to Romania. I know all of this because I am Romanian.
The main gameplay loop is that people come into your speakeasy, an underground bar, every day and you make them a drink and question them about their life and the most recent murder. There’s a drink mixing minigame where you have to figure out their favorite drink based on relatively vague hints and make it for them by dragging your mouse across the screen following the lines.
Character have a “drunk” meter that decides, occasionally, what things they’ll share with you. If they’re tipsy, they’ll spill the beans on some things, and if they’re drunk, they’ll tell you all of their dirty little secrets. Making their favorite drink also raises their affection, which just means they like you more and might share some more secrets.
Overall, after quite a few hours of playing, I can say the making drinks part of the game is pretty fun, especially since the drinks menu changes each chapter, so you need to figure out the customers’ new favorite drink each time. Unfortunately, I feel the mechanic is a bit too easy to game if you’re quick at finding their favorite drink. You always end up giving them their favorite drink and only giving them something a stronger drink when you want to reveal a drunk secret.
Still, the drinks are just a means to an end. You use them to reveal what each person knows about the current case, and sometimes just things about themselves. There are a lot of characters that will pop into the speakeasy that have absolutely no relevance to the current case you’re on, so you just use the time to get to know them, since, if you’re like me, you end up guessing they’ll be relevant later on. And they are.
The clues are one of my favorite parts of Best Served Cold. As you talk to the people around the bar, you will get clues. You can then ask the clientele about these clues and see their opinions on them or put the clues together to get to the logical conclusion. Luckily I’ve figured out the clues mechanic easily, but the problem sometimes is that you have no idea who will give you the clue you’re looking for.
For example, I had a case where I knew perfectly someone didn’t do the crime. But for the sake of being a completionist, I wanted to get the motive, evidence, and defense for them. I had all of the clues and knew exactly what the game wanted to use for all of these, but I ended up forgetting I can ask my friendly neighborhood detectives about it, which instantly got me what I was missing.
Still, the game is very easy, at least for me. You have 16 days to get all of the clues and evidence to complete all of the murder cases. I’ve perfectly finished all cases with all of the clues gathered in around 9 days for all of them. And that was just because I figured I was missing something and was waiting for specific characters to appear in the bar again.
I think one of the things that makes is so easy is the fact that you have a list of suspects and you just have to go through each little piece of evidence against them. There’s no way one of the suspects isn’t the actual killer, which makes things very easy to figure out.
Which actually gets me to the best part of Best Served Cold: the characters. The part which shines most are the characters. Getting to know them, their flaws and strengths, is very entertaining. Most of the characters are built in a way in which you think you know their “template” until they turn around and do something very unexpected. The killers have been easy to spot, at least from my point of view, but talking to these killers can be very fascinating, especially when you already know what they’ve done and question them about it.
One criticism that I might have is the tutorial case, case 0, does something that can feel a bit overwhelming. When I finished it and the game continued, I just had to exit the game and give it some time, because it puts the player in a bit of a tiring situation. The easiest way to fix this problem would have been maybe to make the case a bit quicker to solve, so you wouldn’t spend maybe a lot of hours trying to max out affections with all characters, only for it to be a bit… pointless.
Either way, I can full heartedly recommend Best Served Cold to anyone that enjoys either detective stories or just well written pieces of art.
Best Served Cold
