I had never played a game set in my own city until I played "Necrobarista," set in Melbourne. It's obviously not Australia (no kangaroos in it), but it does feature dead outlaw Ned Kelly as a supernatural enforcer in shorts and a Collingwood scarf, terrorizing back-alley cafes. If the New York show wants me to know about bodegas and Tompkins Square Park, the Melbourne game can safely reference Collingwood.

"Necrobarista" is a visual novel about the Terminal, a café that serves ghosts and the living. It is a space between the afterlife and Carlton, where the dead have a corpse and are limited to 24 hours before they can move on. People exceed that time limit, but in doing so, the debt that the terminal is supposed to repay grows. Its owner does not repay it, and this is where the conflict arises.

Unlike visual novels, in which 2D characters glide across a static background, "Necrobarista" is 3D. There are brief animations of characters pouring drinks and walking around, but even when they are not, cinematic flourishes are considered: two characters talk with their heads close together in wide shots, while close-ups suggest metaphorical distance on opposite sides of the screen. The text sometimes oscillates, swirls, and grows. Everything about the composition is thoughtful.

The storyline does not branch, but this is a visual novel, not a visual novelistic game. There are interactive elements in "Necrobalista. In between chapters, the user can walk around the terminal from a first-person perspective and find vignettes called "memories". This is optional and gives insight into the staff and customers.

Click on the highlighted words during a chapter to see additional text that adds context or explains slang or mysticism. These word clouds, called fragments, reappear at the end of the chapter and you are asked to select seven. Each word is related to a theme, character, or place, and after you have chosen one, it is grouped into a category such as "magic" or "lore." Only after you have chosen a word are you informed of what fragment it is, but things like magic and lore are obviously duplicates. To unlock each memory, you need three fragments of a particular type. To unlock the memory for the character named Maddie, you need one fragment each of "Maddie," "Food," and "Death. The memory found so far and the fragments needed to unlock that memory are shown in the menu. I stared at the word cloud, thinking, "I need more death and Melbourne."

The continuation of "Necrobarista" is a story of dealing with grief, interspersed with jokes about people ordering overly complicated coffee. It begins with Kishan, a Melbournian who has just died, wandering into the terminal and explaining to us, the convenient viewpoint figures, how to do our jobs. Meanwhile, Maddy and Chey, necromancer baristas, struggle to keep their business afloat, distracted by debt collector Ned and cocky teenager Ashley.

Conversations about death and legacy, on the one hand, are deliberately contrasted with the nonsense of a malfunctioning robot, on the other. The deft switch from the tragic to the comical is one of "Necrobalista's" greatest strengths.

The tone is cartoonish, as suggested by the big-eyed characters, although there are many Australian-esque phrases. For example, Ashley is a robotic genius with a cybernetic arm who scratch-builds his own Tachikoma. The film also lapses into the formalism of a writer who grew up reading Japanese translated into stilted, occasionally misspelled, English; it's the only place you'll find a vibrant nightlife scene amid the 1800s factories, shot bars, and apartment buildings. "

Occasionally, the skeleton of another necrobarista peeks out. Along the way, three characters appear and then quickly disappear. The ability to walk around the scene, listening to people's thoughts, that was present in the demo, is no longer here. If video game funding were as easy to come by as a $3.50 flat white in Melbourne, it probably would have been possible.

What is there, however, remains excellent. It is brilliantly presented, the camera finds interesting angles in every scene, and the story hits every emotion, whether dealing with loss or puns. Plus, I had a strong craving for sourdough toast with eggs, grilled tomatoes, mushrooms, and beans on top. And muffins. No, not the poppyseed ones.