Not to sound judgmental, but some of you out there really love the look of anime girls blowing clouds of smoke. If you’re one of them, I have good news! Hookah Haze is a game about watching anime girls blow out billowing clouds of smoke. Based on my social media feed, that alone is enough to attract a not-so-small fan base. I’m looking at you, fellow ANN reviewer Steve Jones.
To the rest of us, Hookah Haze seems like a lesser copy of VA-11 Hall-A, the popular visual novel/adventure game about bartending in a cyberpunk future. Although it takes place in modern-day Akihabara, the aesthetic of dim lighting, pink/cyan neon, and costume designs that would be at home at a rave give it a similar “cozy cyberpunk” feel. The gameplay is simple, with a few mini-games to mix shisha to create different flavors and swap out the coals to create moderate-intensity smoke that breaks up the visual novel’s dialogue.
What makes it worse than its predecessor and a fairly forgettable, if enjoyable, game overall is that it's largely superficial. You play as Tohru, a twenty-something who has spent most of his life suffering from an unspecified debilitating illness. Your most recent attempt at treatment has failed, and you've decided to turn to palliative care instead of trying the last remaining option. Your doctor recommends you try Last Wish, a program for terminally ill patients to live out their final dreams before they die. Your wish is more abstract than most: you want to form connections with other people, something that's always difficult due to your illness. Your doctor suggests you put your hobbies, your straws, and your fish tank to good use, and sets you up with a shop in Akihabara. They also give you two weeks' worth of painkillers so you can function well enough to run a business.
It doesn't take long for customers to start showing up, and you spend two weeks getting to know your regulars. These regulars are three girls: Amu, an Akihabara maid who's both spoiled and sweet; Kokoro, whose cheerfulness hides deep hurt and sadness; and Kurumi, a doll designer who's as obsessed with nuts as she is attractive. They chat over shisha, getting to know each other as well as Tohru. As is common in these types of games, you grow closer to each of them as they slowly open up about their problems, even as Tohru remains tight-lipped about hers.
The thing is, two weeks isn’t a long time. It makes it believable that the characters would develop such deep relationships and understand each other’s problems in such a short period of time. I’m not saying you can’t feel a kinship with everyone right away, but the structure is such that Tohru doesn’t just hear about their problems, but also helps them start taking steps to solve them. As a result, everything feels compressed and shallow, starting from the archetypes to make the characters feel familiar rather than building them from the ground up. Kokoro’s cheerfulness to hide her insomnia and psychological wounds? For what, you don’t say! The writing is pleasant enough, but combined with the short runtime – all the routes can be done in an afternoon – the surface-level character writing makes the story’s ruminations on mortality only marginally impactful.
The gameplay is also pretty boring. First of all, this is a visual novel, so I didn't have high expectations beyond clicking to continue dialogue and making the occasional choice, but it's annoying because the mini-games don't matter much. And when I say they don't matter much, what I really mean is they don't matter at all. Every day, your customers will tell you what kind of mix they want, but whether or not you mix their favorite doesn't affect the plot. Same with resetting the coals, which happens in the middle of each visit; you can set it so hot that they burn their throats and they'll keep coming.
The only choices the player makes that make a difference are what combinations make up the daily special, which determines who appears; and at the end of each path there is a good or bad ending. Notice how I phrased that—which choice is right is obvious, whether you’re thinking about what the right thing to do or say is, or you notice that the “good” choice is always on the left and the “bad” choice is always on the right.
But I get it – it’s not the challenge, it’s the vibe. And I have to admit, the vibe of Hookah Haze is perfect. The moe-style character designs aren’t my speed, but the two-dimensional pixel art is adorable. While I’ve never smoked, there’s definitely a certain satisfaction in watching characters take long, slow drags from their pipes and blow the smoke out with a faraway look in their eyes… I’d be lying if I said I didn’t consider wandering over to the hookah bar two blocks away once or twice. There’s a programmable playlist of low-tempo beats, but there’s one major drawback: the songs restart if a new scene comes up in the middle of a track, but the tracks are longer than most scenes. After manually skipping to the next song a few times, I turned the music off completely and just enjoyed the rain as background noise.
Hookah Haze is a perfectly fun way to spend an afternoon, but with other games that do the same thing but better, I'm not sure I can really recommend this one. Well, unless you're one of those perverts (I say that affectionately) who likes anime girls smoking. In that case, follow your bliss.
