Necrobarista is a new visual novel about a spooky supernatural coffee house

Ever noticed how many coffee shops there are these days? Literally, every street in the country now contains at least one semi-Scandi, super-minimal flat white dispensary that also does a perfectly serviceable whole wheat banana muffin and probably proffers the odd bottle of difficult tasting natural wine to boot.

What, though, if your favourite spot for a Saturday morning espresso was haunted? That’s the question that Australian design team Route 59 is asking in its forthcoming visual novel Necrobarista.

Built in a 3D graphical framework while maintaining a 2D “hand-drawn” anime-inspired aesthetic, the action takes place in a spooked-out coffee shop in Melbourne. Here, the dead rise from their graves to get their rotten, repulsive hands on one final, final cup of coffee. Which might be exactly what all of us find ourselves craving as we’re lowered into the ground.

Route 59 claims that, through a series of vignettes, “players will experience the story from the varied viewpoints of a diverse cast of characters,” while getting to “experience a supernaturally-tinged version of the local culture of Melbourne’s cafe scene.”

On that note, Route 59’s Kevin Chen told It’s Nice That that the only sensible option when it comes to ordering a coffee in a shop stuffed to the gills with partially reanimated corpses is “a short black,” because “you can’t mess that up!”

Produced with game-making software Unity 3D, and featuring a cast of gangsters, hipsters, necromancers, and baristas, the “cinematic visual novel” will be available to purchase and play in early 2019.