Best Served Cold Review: Adequate, But Too Watered Down

Best Served Cold is a game that initially caught my eye with its excellent premise: it’s prohibition, and you’re running an illegal speakeasy. The cops are desperate to catch a killer, and so they’re willing to turn a blind eye to your bar if you help them; slyly interrogating your customers and listening out for any clues that will advance the case. It’s a great setup for a visual novel, and one that promises a good mix of puzzles and story.

Unfortunately, the game doesn’t mine the potential of its premise too deeply in either department. What could be an enjoyable ongoing story never ends up getting too complex or daring, and while the various characters are all enjoyable enough and have nice arcs, there’s little here that you won’t have seen before. The puzzles are even worse - after settling on a handful of simple mechanics, most of which are irritating or under utilised, they never evolve in any meaningful way, or present a serious challenge to the player.

How then, exactly, does the game drop the ball? What sections would I like to see expanded on in a theoretical sequel or update, and how could the game be improved from adequate to great? Join me in this review as I explore the different elements of Best Served Cold, and how they managed to get shaken together into a bitter, underwhelming mix.

Story

As I mentioned above, I think that the general setup of Best Served Cold is great. Although I was initially under the impression from the game’s trailer that there would only be a single murderer to catch, the game actually provides five different murder mysteries throughout its runtime. The game makes it clear from the start that the detective you’re working with barely tolerates your presence, which then gives a nice thread to run through the game as your reason for assisting him changes from case to case.

The majority of the game takes place in the same location, behind the bar of the illegal speakeasy, and the atmosphere crafted there is immaculate. The environment feels cultured and comfy, and it absolutely feels like a place that people would want to visit in spite of its legal status. In spite of the game rarely moving from the bar, it nevertheless does a great job of crafting the city beyond the bar, the fictional Bukovia, creating a picture of a place rich with history and culture.

The best part of the story, however, is the characters. Given the premise it shouldn’t come as a surprise to hear that you’ll frequently see the same characters visiting your bar, and as such you’ll get to know them quite well by the end of the game. The characters are all generally quite enjoyable to interact with, and they have nice little arcs that play out over the course of the game. I particularly enjoyed Killian, a dandy under the thumb of his overbearing mother, who has a bit of Bertie Wooster in him. Where he ends up by the end of the story isn’t anything too revolutionary or surprising, but that doesn’t make it any less fun to witness.

Unfortunately, this is around where the positive things I have to say about the game end. While the characters are all fairly enjoyable, the game takes a while to introduce all of them. Several characters, including one that I particularly liked, don’t get introduced until the third case, and have varying degrees of importance in the following case. For reasons that I’ll get to in a later section, the game reintroduces you to most of the characters in the second case, after they’ve already appeared in the prior chapter. There’s an in-universe reason for it, but that doesn’t fix the feeling that some characters get the short stick when it comes to screen time.

I mentioned that the characters have nice little arcs, but what’s less nice is the sudden romance option thrown in at the end of the game. In the final case you’re given the option to ask any of your regulars whether they’ve got any sort of romantic feelings for you, which they can either confirm or deny. It feels very abrupt given no earlier opportunities for flirting and the like, and there’s no additional epilogue, even in a simple form such as a text paragraph, if you do romance someone. As a result the romance feels like it was included less because it was integral to the developers’ vision, and more to check a box.

While most cases in the story are adequate enough in terms of the actual beats of the mystery, there’s little to connect them beyond returning characters. In spite of discussions by characters building up the possibility of war erupting, no such thing happens, which feels like a missed opportunity, especially when one case has the victim be a high-ranking government official. Cases are subsequently less a grand tapestry of interwoven threads, and more so a mystery of the week. There’s nothing wrong with it, per se, but it never feels like the game evolves beyond its basic formula. I wish that the developers had looked at something like Ace Attorney, for how to mix standalone cases with a grand narrative that builds up into something more satisfactory and dramatic.

Gameplay

While the story of Best Served Cold is adequate enough, at the cost of not being particularly revolutionary, it’s the gameplay where things really fall apart. The core gameplay loop consists of you making a drink for somebody, which will affect both how much they want to talk to you, and how intoxicated they get. Once you’ve served them the drink, you can talk to them from a list of topics, or present them with clues that you’ve discovered. Once you’ve done this for everybody in the bar for the night, you can combine clues on a corkboard to potentially extrapolate further clues. You’ll keep going through this cycle until you have a motive and proof of guilt for a suspect, and no defence which proves them innocent.

The gameplay's problems begin with serving somebody a drink. Although the game encourages you to learn what everybody’s favourite cocktails are, there’s very little reason not to simply serve them whichever drink will make them the most talkative. There’ll occasionally be times when you need to get a customer to a certain level of intoxication or put them in the right mood for a particular question, but these moments are few and far between, and once you have the answer you need, you can resume serving them whatever gets them talking. 

Mixing drinks also requires you to perform a simple minigame, each and every single time. This minigame is simple enough that it’s incredibly difficult to screw it up, and even if you do, the worst that usually happens is the customer won’t talk to you as much as they would otherwise, and it’ll put them in a bad mood. Subsequently, each conversation is essentially prefixed with fifteen or so seconds of padding, including an animation of the drink being poured, none of which can be skipped. It doesn’t sound that bad in a vacuum, but most nights you’ll have at least three or four customers, and each case can last up to two weeks in-universe. Add it all up and that gives you more than half an hour of unskippable animations and a bland, boring minigame throughout the game’s runtime.

Serving somebody a drink is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the gameplay, however. As mentioned above, you’ll spend large portions of the game asking people questions, or presenting them with clues. There’s a very large problem with this system, and it’s that the game treats each of these interactions as if they're in a vacuum. By that I mean that the game doesn’t consider the history of how you’ve already interacted with your customers. It’s possible to show somebody a clue that provides a suspect with an alibi, and have them say, “Oh, I guess they’re off the hook then. That’s great!” You can then show them a clue that points to that suspect’s motivation, or evidence that they could have done it, and the same person will react with, “My god! If this is true, then a murderer is right here, in the bar!” 

It gets even worse when you’re interacting with somebody who you’ll later discover is the murderer - you can show them evidence that they’re guilty, and they’ll simply respond with “Grr, you’re so gullible!” They never push back with new evidence which causes you to doubt it, or defend themselves in any plausible way. As a result, there’s never any reason not to simply show every clue to every customer - if you try and play it safe, you’ll likely miss the thread of logic that the developers subscribe to, and if you annoy someone, so what? They’ll have completely forgotten about it by the time you present them with the next clue. This paradoxically makes the cases with few clues or suspects easier than those flooded with them, as you have less clues to show, and can therefore interrogate people faster.

The way that the game treats every interaction as being in a vacuum also greatly hurts the way that cases resolve. In games like Ace Attorney and Danganronpa, the investigation and trials are linear affairs. The writers are thus able to guide players along a carefully woven story, revealing twists at crucial moments, since they can guarantee that you won’t have some critical information. Best Served Cold’s more sandbox approach, however, completely denies that possibility. I mentioned above that you’re trying to find a suspect with a motivation and proof of guilt, but no alibi. You could theoretically have it down to two suspects, having discovered motivation and evidence for both of them, only to unexpectedly get an alibi for one of them. There’s no moment of it all clicking, of a twist reveal occurring - instead, you get a sense of “oh, huh, I guess it must be that person then.” The game can’t set things up for any big twists, because it can’t guarantee that you’ve seen the evidence that those twists hinge on.

The above already makes the core gameplay loop flawed, but things get worse when you factor in the developers’ logic on cases, as I alluded to earlier. There’s only ever one way to unlock a clue or evidence, and that’s the way that the developers want. To use an example, in one case I’d discovered that one supposedly-wealthy character was secretly impoverished. I had a clue that the victim, a genuinely wealthy woman, was being blackmailed. Could this be a sign that the former character was blackmailing the latter for money to continue their ruse, and that they had murdered them when they failed to play along? It’s pretty solid logic, but the game didn’t think so, because I couldn’t combine the clues on my character’s corkboard.

Similarly, sometimes you’ll have something that seems like a smoking gun, and you’ll be eager to present it to someone relevant…only for them to come back with, “Oh, this means nothing to me.” Fair enough, except you’ll then present them with something similar - a clue that this one derived from, perhaps - and they’ll have all sorts of thoughts and feelings on it. It’s frustrating when this happens, and just gives you more reason to simply spam clues at your customers without a care in the world. Similarly, there’s never any reason not to simply combine all of your available clues on the corkboard until you get something - there’s no penalty for combining incorrect clues, and if you keep doing so you’ll eventually gain some new information.

Weirdly enough, the game even sort of encourages this behaviour in one instance. Midway through an early chapter of the game you’re given access to the S.T.A.C., a sort of proto-computer which lets you look up information on characters or the world. It’s the perfect opportunity to spice up the gameplay a little - make it so that we have to type in the subject we’re looking up, to prove that we’re paying attention and understand the case so far. But this opportunity is completely dropped, and S.T.A.C. instead presents you with a list of information related to the case, which you can interact with at your leisure. There’s not even a limitation, such as only letting you look up one entry per day - so why, then, shouldn’t you simply click through everything it presents to you?

So, what does all of this gameplay, with its lack of consequences, strictly linear logic, and open-ended clue acquisition lead me to? It leads me to the following flow chart, which I developed myself around the start of the third case. If you’re playing the game and struggling with your current case, give it a go! No matter how things might seem, if you follow this chart, you’ll never, ever fail a case, or miss a clue by the end of one. Given that Best Served Cold is supposed to be about carefully wheedling information out of your customers, I consider the universal applicability of this chart to be a pretty big failure on its part.

The Final Case

The final case of the game features some story elements that threw me off - and not in a good way - so strongly that I want to raise them in their own section. If you’re interested in playing the game and don’t want to be spoiled, then feel free to skip this section, but if you don’t mind reading spoilers, then you can click the button below to reveal this section.

As has been mentioned, the main premise of the game is that you’re working with a police detective to catch criminals, and the partnership is fairly strained. The game does a good job of selling this premise by ending the first case, after you’ve caught the killer, with said detective metaphorically stabbing you in the back. He reveals that although you’ve assisted him with a high-profile case, you’re nevertheless running an illegal speakeasy during prohibition, and thus he has no choice but to lock you away for the next year. The player, who has thus far been simply called “Bartender”, and who doesn’t have a visual representation in-game, is naturally outraged, but can’t do anything about it.

The next case then opens a year later, with the player being hired to run the bar once more. Once again, we’re simply referred to as “Bartender”, and it threw me off a bit to start with - are we the same character from before? If so, it’s odd that none of the characters recognise us. Could it be that we’re the same character, but have disguised ourselves so as to get revenge on the detective, thus explaining the game’s title? While this wasn’t the case, it turns out that I wasn’t too far off.

Skipping ahead to the final case, the victim this time is Victor, the man who owns both the bar and the bookshop above it. He’s stabbed in the street, and is sent to hospital, but while trying to work out what happened you come across evidence that Hugo, the detective you’ve been working with throughout the game, is also being targeted. After a bit more investigating, you discover that the most likely culprit is Sandra, an irregular customer of yours, who’s spent a little bit of her time giving you advice on how to interact with your other customers. Oh, and she’s also the character that we played as for the first case, don’tcha know?

To say that this is disorienting is an understatement. The game has consistently portrayed the player character as a stand-in for the person playing the game, minus the odd reference to our background here and there, so to reveal this late in that our initial character actually has a name and face feels messy. Changing to the second bartender was already a bit off-putting - now we’re revealing that the character we thought was ours all along has been popping in and out? 

In-universe, this reveal is also done very casually, with a character simply saying, “Oh, yeah, Sandra used to run this bar a while back,” which removes weight from it. Weirdly enough, the game then puts more weight on revealing to the player character that Sandra was in prison, and that she was betrayed by Hugo. While this would be shocking to the player character, it’s old news to the actual person playing the game now that we know Sandra was our original character. The entire reveal is lopsided and messy, with the game placing emphasis in entirely the wrong place.

As a result, the game feels dissonant. The reveal that Sandra is our former player character, while occasionally foreshadowed, feels very left-field, and while it’s an admirable attempt at a nice, solid twist, it’s one that relies almost entirely on meta-knowledge rather than in-universe information. The reveal shows that the developers want us to be surprised, but at the expense of whatever character we’ve built up throughout the game thus far, discarding our development and headcanon in favour of real-world reactions and thoughts.

I think that this twist irks me so much because it’s not actually that well done. If we’d been shown Sandra’s name and face at the start of the game, we could have grown more attached to her as a character. The game could have made it clear that she’s the former player character, but contrasted her with the second bartender more, or given her a stronger mentor role. If this had been well-done, then it wouldn’t have mattered that she’s the first character we play as - we would have felt betrayed by her because she’s our friend, not because she’s who we once were. Did they hide her identity because they were that afraid that we would guess her goals based on the game’s title?

Conclusion

Best Served Cold is a game that brings a nice premise to the table and intoxicates you with promises of where things could go, but upon consuming it reveals itself to be fairly watered down. The stories never meaningfully connect to one another or push back against the player’s actions, while the gameplay feels quite padded and slow, requiring little critical thinking from the player. 

In writing my criticisms about the game, I have to stop and ask myself: am I misguided, and this is just an example of a game that’s not for me? If I look at it as being a cosy mystery, it explains a good chunk of the gameplay and story decisions, and it’s possible that I’ve been coming at it from the wrong angle, expecting things that it hasn’t been promising. 

Unfortunately, I don’t think that I’m the one to blame here. Checking the game’s Steam page, the first line of its short description asks players: “Can you mix a cocktail while eye-to-eye with a criminal?” That’s definitely not giving a cosy vibe. The game’s release trailer emphasises the need to lie to your customers and intoxicate them, conveniently neglecting to mention that there are no major consequences for making mistakes. If Best Served Cold is a cosy game, it’s not being advertised as one. I feel that it’s more likely that the developers were less aiming to create a cosy game, and more that they found themselves creating one by accident when they defanged the gameplay systems present.

With all of that in mind, I can’t recommend Best Served Cold as a game to play. While the story is adequate, and I’d go so far as to describe the characters as likeable, it can’t really stand up to the giants of the genre. If you want a bartending simulator, I’d recommend VA-11 HALL-A, or The Red Strings Club, above it. If you want a series of thrilling mysteries about capturing criminals through interrogation and presenting clues, then Ace Attorney has you covered. As it is, Best Served Cold is like a cheap drink on a night out: it’s underwhelming, watered down, and you can’t help but feel that you could have spent your money on something better.