Tough Beans

While I enjoyed the author's work Mite enough to wonder about her other works, the name Tough Beans made me cringe. It's not offensive or anything, of course. It's just, who says a phrase like that? Even ironically? It doesn't work! I remember someone in my college dorm who said Cool Beans, which was close enough to the borderline. (He also missed the point of Joe Pesci's "you think I'm funny?" rant in Goodfellas.) But eventually curiosity got the best of me. I didn't find out what the name meant for a while. It turns out it's the name of a coffee shop, the sort everyone goes to but nobody really admits they go to. It's there that the main drama takes place.

You start off late for work, at a job your father got for you, well sort of (he'd hoped to do better.) You've always felt a bit spoiled, and yet your family hasn't encouraged you into a career that really soars. You also have evidence your boyfriend Derek's been cheating on you, and there's also the matter of your dog having his jaws around one of your pairs of heels. So this feels like a "my bad job" sort of game, especially with your boss, Soren Pickleby, being--well, a real turnip. He's asked you to do some relatively simple stuff, but one quickly suspects he would enjoy saying "It's simple stuff, what's wrong with you?" more than actually having it done quickly. Oh, there's low-grade sexual harassment in there, too.

One of the things you must do, and do it now, is an errand to get coffee at Tough Beans, where you run into your cheating boyfriend Derek and the coworker who was supposed to help you sign off on one paper. The hijinks start piling up there--there's a vagrant who wants a cigarette, and there's a hipster with a cigarette behind their ear, and it's pretty clear what to do, there. (With appropriate "gee, does this guy really need a cigarette?" reflection.)

There's a certain amount of reflection throughout the game as to how you met Derek, what impressed you about him, why you're still together, and so forth, and he's revealed to be a bit of a slimeball. You go through a lot of denial about Derek's cheating, and there are endings where you realize it's over, and you don't. You do, however, have a moment of reckoning with your boss.

The puzzles (there are "do what your boss says" things which develop your character nicely but aren't really puzzle) aren't too tough. They can be solved nonviolently, but when you get to the end of the game, you may only have half of the full points. How you miss the points was interesting to me--the game doesn't display "your score went up by one point," and so I missed that calling the right person at the start got you a point. Which makes sense. We generally don't think of life in terms of scoring points. But the general idea with points is, there's standing up for yourself, and there's REALLY standing up for yourself and finding ways to. I enjoyed the mechanic, even if I didn't stand up for myself very well. And then there are the amusing actions that don't get points, like smacking Derek, who deserves it. You have a chance to destroy his car, which the game rejects, but it's fun to try. This sort of thing makes Tough Beans replayable, as you'll probably miss things, but on the other hand, you may argue you don't need to stand up for yourself perfectly, and looking back too much on that gets in the way if the next good experience.

There was a lot of light-hearted humor through Tough Beans underscoring your inability to stick up for yourself. This went beyond "poor me, the world is against me," and even though its main character was a completely different demographic from me, certain things resonated. It's an interesting meshing of "my lousy job/apartment/relationship" and does so without drowning in self-pity or hopelessness.