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0 Like many around the world, I am a fan of bubble tea. And so when the opportunity to play Call of Boba from Tomatoast landed in my inbox, I couldn’t say no. The game is available now in early access on Steam for £10.99.
You’re having a bubble
The game markets itself as a cosy pixel art adventure about saving a struggling Boba Tea shop. I’ve seen many a Boba Tea shop, and I’ll be honest I’ve never seen them struggling. Are you a bubble tea fan? Let us know in the comments below!
Gameplay
Call of Boba is like a typical cosy game, it eases you in gently with no heavy hitting themes at all. Wait, no. That’s not true at all. Starting up the game you’re confronted by an overworked Penguin who is disillusioned with their job, terrified of letting down their parents and has overworked themselves into the hospital. The intro scene is long and there is a lot of text to read. Don’t get me wrong, it sets the scene but I also felt myself becoming disengaged the longer it went on.
Once you’re finally out of the tutorial and in the gameplay I’m afraid things didn’t get too much better for me. Take for instance the bubble tea making. Within the tutorial you have to make your first milk tea through a mini game. Whilst the UI was a bit janky to understand at first, I got there and found it enjoyable. It’s what I was hoping the game would involve. Unfortunately, this mini game/mechanic barely shows up again, aside in character quests. When running the shop and taking customer orders you instead survive a loop of just clicking F. This definitely feels a missed opportunity.
UI issues
Let’s talk more about the UI of the game. It is simply not fully functional. Whether you play on keyboard and mouse or controller, the controls are not intuitive or easy. There are aspects of the game that have thorough in-depth instructions, whilst other things that could do with more explanation have nothing. I found text overlapping or floating over icons and icons floating over menu bars.
There are a few times during my playthrough where I felt I had either skipped something entirely or I had found yet another bug. For instance opening the shop. I spent more time then I care to admit to, trying to work out how on earth to do it. After asking some other players, I realised it was a good old UI issue. When you open your shop a menu board pops up, you choose your drinks and away you go. Only you don’t. You have to once again hold down that trusty F to hold the check mark, which in turn opens the shop. This isn’t made clear. At least not to me and a few others!
Graphics and Audio
Call of Boba as you’ve no doubt guessed has pixel art graphics. They’re cute enough. However, a lot of these are not in scale. For instance during the weird dream scene where Bobo is shooting up their old workplace. Just what you expect from a cosy game eh?
The soundtrack to Call of Boba is sweet. It was nice background music but with no real earworms. It was just there. Which can be a positive or a negative depending on who you ask! There is no voice acting, but characters are somewhat voiced in that when their speech text appears at the bottom of the screen so does some high pitched squeaking. I think the developers were going for an Animal Crossing style noise but I actually found it spoilt my game immersion, rather than adding to it.
Final Thoughts
I was hoping for a game that focused on running a cosy little Bubble Tea shop. Instead I was greeted by a game that isn’t sure if it wants to be a Shop Sim or an RPG. And yet did not have enough of either aspect. Cusineer is one of my favourite games and struck the balance of these elements perfectly. At the moment I cannot say the same with Call of Boba. It feels lacking.
I really wanted to love this game. And whilst I appreciate Call of Boba has only just released in Early Access, I would still expect to see a lot more polish then it has. It definitely needs some more time in the development oven. Maybe even some complete re-workings. If this was not just a preview article but a full review, I would be giving it the Thumb Culture Broken Award. However, this is a preview article. And so I’ll leave you with this, I would give Call of Boba some time before you even think about picking it up. For me, I can’t see myself picking this game up again until its had some major quality of life improvements. If at all.
Disclaimer: A code was received in order to write this preview.
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