Best Served Cold demo ready for consumption

• Announcements by Jack Allin
• Published:

Bartending sim meets narrative adventure in upcoming murder mystery for PC and consoles

If you're in need of clues to unsolved murder mysteries and looking for ways to get people to open up, why not ply 'em with booze! That may be illegal for cops, but not for a bartender, which is exactly the role players will assume in Best Served Cold, an upcoming narrative adventure by indie Belgian developer Rogueside spent almost entirely behind a bar. 

Technically it's against the law for you, too, as it's a time of Prohibition in the once-thriving (fictional) city of Bukovie. But a series of unsolved murders around local speakeasies has the police stumped, and an ambitious detective believes you might be the key to cracking the case. You are the bartender at The Nightcap, an "illegal bar in the basement of an upscale bookstore ... renowned for its varied clientele that spans the social strata." Looking to escape a shady past of your own and start anew, you have little choice but to comply with the detective's instructions to chat up your customers for potential leads. To do that, you'll need to prove your worth as a mixologist, serving just the right drinks that will "affect your patrons’ mood and loosen their tongues." You'll need to ask the right questions too, and then form connections on the evidence corkboard in your apartment at the end of each day, producing new avenues of inquiry. 

Inspired by the "cultural and artistic revival of 1920s Bucharest," Best Served Cold is primarily a hand-drawn visual novel with light roleplaying choices. Each day you can select which customers to call to the bar for a little one-on-one time so you can probe them for information. An on-screen mood gauge determines how talkative they'll be, but making a drink they like is sure to lift anyone's spirits (no pun intended). Mixing cocktails is a simple matter of completing a brief connect-the-dots minigame, but choosing the best one for each particular patron from the list of recipes available is crucial to success. Even at their chattiest, you'll have limited "topic" points available, so you must pick the best course of conversation from the options available to "coax out confessions and uncover clues using the friendships you build." In doing so, you'll not only learn more about your eclectic cast of customers, but also uncover a richly layered story about Bukovie itself, a city "where cultural, political and economic shifts are fragmenting the old order, creating new tensions in a changing world." 

There is no target date for the full launch of Best Served Cold on PC, PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo Switch consoles just yet, but a playable demo is available now on Steam to whet your whistle while you wait. 

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