Review for Midnight Ramen

Midnight Ramen, from Asian developer Cointinue Games, is a game in the mold of Coffee Talk and VA-11 Hall-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action. In other words, it’s a mostly narrative-based experience in which people wander into your shop where you serve them food and/or beverages and have conversations. Here, though, you’re operating a ramen stand, and serving them noodles, not coffee or mixed drinks.

As with the previously mentioned titles, food creation in Midnight Ramen is the only real aspect of gameplay. The main pleasure is in conversing with and exploring the personalities of the people who sit down at the counter. You play as a 17-year-old apprentice to the ramen stand’s owner, who is around to help you out if there are difficulties, although you seem to prepare the vast majority of the food that your customers request.

The twist, though, is that you and your mentor are psychopomps; your customers are mostly dead, and it’s your goal to shepherd them toward accepting their deaths and their final reward. The dead don’t have a lot to do, being (you know) dead, but it takes them a while to understand and accept their new reality, and in the meantime eating some delicious ramen and talking to you gives them something to hold onto. In this, Midnight Ramen is reminiscent of Spiritfarer which, though featuring very different gameplay, also asserts that the dead apparently still need to eat, and you spend a fair bit of time cooking them tasty meals.

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For the most part, Midnight Ramen is pretty chill, reinforced by its lo-fi music (which does get repetitive, but since the game is fairly short, this is forgivable). I say “for the most part,” because – the dead are generally not happy about being dead, and the game does delve into dark issues, like suicide and death from overwork. Still, those themes are carried in conversation, not graphically, and the psychopomp theme of helping people move on makes them emotionally more navigable.

Midnight Ramen does the visual novel trick of having a handful of images for each character, with each representing a different emotional state and flipping from one still image to another as the state of mind changes; there’s not a lot of animation here. The images themselves are anime-influenced and charming enough in context, but as with the music, the repetition wears after a time.

The stories of the characters you meet – and the protagonist’s own story – are surprisingly emotionally impactful. I’ll even admit to tearing up in the final scenes. That being said, some of the characters are a bit stereotyped – the overworked salaryman, the daughter of a fierce "Tiger Mom". But you still sympathize with them.

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The overall experience is fairly short; I clocked in at 4 hours, and there isn’t a lot of variation if you replay making different ramen choices. But it’s priced at a reasonable level for that amount of challenge, and I thoroughly enjoyed my time with the game.

If you’re a fan of Coffee Talk or VA-11 Hall-A, then Midnight Ramen is definitely worth checking out. However, don’t expect significant depth of puzzles or action gameplay.