VA-11 Hall-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action Reviews

Va-11 Hall-a is the first game I actively tried to complete, which, in the end, left a slightly sour taste, but not enough of on to make me not recommend the game.

You are Jill, a bartender at VA-11 Hall-A, also known as Valhalla. Throughout this ~7 hour game (if you aren't skipping dialogue and, like I did, read it aloud), you will meet a medium-sized cast, ranging from loud, aggressive and downright rude Donavan D. Dawson; to the hyperactive horny Lilim (think sentient robot) Dorothy; to the kind, calm, albeit a bit slow Sei.

A main complaint I hear when talking to others about this game, or when recommending it, is that there isn't really a big story. I believe that is the point. You're just a bartender, you have no reason to be looking into big conspiracies. Sure, you'll hear dribs and drabs from clients, but not more. This grounded, down-to-earth feel of the story is what gives the game its charm to me.

Game might be too strong a word. It's a visual novel with more interaction that just clicking a dialogue box. You can actually fail, be it from not making enough money to failing orders enough times.

The characters have life and are genuinely interesting, even the ones who show up once and never again. The graphics are beautiful and the music is amazing (even listen to it on the daily commute, it's just so calming). The only problem is a couple of achievements being a huge spike in difficulty (Seriously, who thought it was a good idea to put an old arcade-style bullet-hell into this thing).

VA-11 Hall-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action is a mouthful of a name for a mouthful of a game. Set in the titular VA-11 Hall-A, AKA Valhalla, in the futuristic dystopian cyberpunk Glitch City, you play as Jill, a poor bartender who works in a run-down bar.

You know that NPC bartender you wander in and talk to in games?

Yeah, that’s who you’re playing as.

Valhalla is less of a game and more of a visual novel; the only “gamish” aspect of it is mixing drinks for patrons. This is really nothing more than following directions 90%+ of the time; rarely, they will give you something you need to think about (usually “the usual”, requiring you to remember what your patrons liked the last time, but sometimes they’ll try to be tricky and ask you for something specific – cold and sweet (so some sweet-tasting drink with ice in it), or even for something more obscure based off of something someone said previously).

Alas, this is the limit of the game’s interactivity. While there are a handful of times you can give someone another drink and get a different reaction out of them, mostly you are just following orders and clicking through what amounts to a visual novel.

And this would be fine if it was actually a good visual novel. Unfortunately, it isn’t.

The game has a cast of characters, and the characters actually do have character. Gil, Jill’s coworker, is a man with a mysterious past which is played for laughs, as your boss Dana is constantly trying to figure out what the deal with him is, while simultaneously Jill worries over him a bit. Dana herself is a boisterous bit of comedy relief herself, but she has a good head on her shoulders and is a good person, albeit one who also relies on the “mysterious past” gag a bit. Jill herself is a kind of sad girl at times, but she has a particular sense of humor (she finds the Bad Touch drink amusing, and she enjoys puns) and she certainly plays off of and teases other people a bit, even while she is grumpy at other times – and a bit more troubled than she lets on by her own past (which takes a bit to come up). Jill also definitely has a crush on her boss, which lends a slight tilt towards some of their interactions.

The patrons also have character – there’s Dorothy, the Lilim (android – or I suppose gynoid, seeing as she’s female) sex worker. She is a complete pervert, but is just so cheerful about it that she really is the high point of the game, grossing out Jill with her stories while simultaneously amusing her and showing just how much she cares. Dorothy genuinely cares about Jill, and Jill cares about Dorothy as well. Alma is another patron who shows up a lot, a female hacker who just got out of a bad relationship and who is another friend of Jill’s. As the game goes on, you meet a lot of other people, some of them fairly forgettable, others who stick out just for their weirdness (and rely too much on it for their characterization), others who just show up and leave without leaving much of an impact on the player, and one, a kindly White Knight (basically a paramedic/rescue worker) named Sei who you end up worrying about after some bad stuff goes down, along with her catgirl friend Stella.

The biggest problem with this is that while some of the characters actually do build up some emotional bonds with the player, it ultimately doesn’t feel like it goes much of anywhere. Around a third of the way through the game, something bad happens to Sei, and the characters worry about them… but ultimately, while the plot seems like it is going to be some big thing, it doesn’t go anywhere. There’s a hacker called White_Rabbit who is involved with that whole thing, but they seem to just kind of fade out of the plot, and you never actually interact with them in person, just read news stories about them in the paper. Alma complains about White_Rabbit towards the beginning, and then as it fades from prominence she starts talking about other things. A plot about Jill’s ex-girlfriend comes up, leaves, comes back, then leaves again before returning at the very end of the game, and is the closest thing there is to a main plot – but it only really involves a couple characters.

And this is really where the game fails. There just isn’t a point to it. There’s no overarching plot tying it all together. A glitch girl who keeps showing up seems like she might be related to the whole thing, but the subplot doesn’t ultimately go anywhere interesting, and I never really ended up caring about her beyond “Why is she important?” There’s no real payoff with Jill’s feelings towards her boss, nor Dorothy’s feelings towards Jill. You never find out what the real deal was with Gil or Jill’s boss.

In the end, there’s nothing that ties the lives of the characters together beyond brief interactions, and in the end, there’s not some way that this all gets tied together into any sort of coherent story. Even the plot that the bar is going to shut down at some point in the indefinite future gets no payoff.

The whole thing just sort of ends, and there was never really any point to it all. You just mixed drinks and talked to people.

A story needs a plot. But Valhalla lacks a real sense of rising action, let alone a proper climax, and there just isn’t enough of a coherent plot for you to feel a real sense of resolution. The game aspect of it is far too lightweight to be entertaining for any real period of time, and at time feels like more of a nuisance than anything, as there’s little sense of actually doing anything meaningful there beyond busywork.

In the end, this is something which feels pointless. It has characters and a setting, but it fails to tell a coherent story with them. There were so many hints of it all having some sort of point in the first week of the game, but then it doesn’t really go anywhere and it all just fizzles out.

I can’t recommend this; it isn’t awful, but it just feels like it is kind of empty, like I spent my time on it but didn’t get much back out of it.