
VA-11 Hall-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action
Price History
Past 36 months · Updated dailyPrices cover Steam and 39 authorized stores; only legitimate offers are counted. The chart shows weekly market-wide lows and Steam's official price across the past 36 months.
01About VA-11 Hall-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action
In VA-11 Hall-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action, you tend bar at a small establishment in Glitch City. Mix drinks to suit your customers and listen to their stories; what you serve shapes the branching narrative. The Steam PC version supports single-player. Confirmed interface languages are English, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese. 97%% positive from 33,920 Steam player reviews. Release date: June 20, 2016.
Credits
Lowest recorded in 36 months
$9.992026-03-27 · GOGBase game · same records as the chart above; USD history, not a regional Steam low.Language support
| Language | Interface | Subtitles | Audio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Simplified Chinese | Yes | — | — |
| English | Yes | — | — |
| Japanese | Yes | — | — |
Steam PC edition data · 2026-10-16
02Before you buy
Play style
The Steam PC version supports single-player. The story branches according to the drinks you prepare for customers.
Languages
Confirmed interface languages are English, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese. Full audio is not listed for these languages.
03Frequently asked questions
Who do I play as?
You play a bartender at the small VA-11 HALL-A bar, nicknamed Valhalla, and get to know its customers through their stories.
How do my decisions affect the story?
The branching story is shaped by the drinks you prepare rather than traditional dialogue choices.
Where is the game set?
It takes place in Glitch City, a cyberpunk dystopia dominated by corporations and oppressive nanomachines.
Popular Steam reviews
Native-language selection · 10 reviewsSelected helpful reviews in this language show both recommendations and criticisms. This selection does not represent the overall positive rating; opinions reflect the version reviewed.
I remember a while back when I stumbled across the webpage for this game. I remember reading the little synopsis, looking at the art and what I've been playing seems very different from what it was originally conceived as. Before (As I recall) you were going to be a male Lilim bartender that people would come in and dump their emotional problems on. However being an AI that doesn't experience emotions in the same way and without a fear of death he would have a hard time offering advice so he'd try to help in the best way he knows: Bartending. There was an acknowledgement of it being about getting to know strangers and that the player would have to approach people differently in asking the right questions or getting them drunk to open up. Then the question would come about if that is even okay to do even with the best intentions? (A la Kim who is calmed by a drink but then sleeps in from her job the next day, but is unavoidable in the story now.) There seemed to be a greater focus on shmoozing and boozing as I think a remnant of the system is still in the game with the ability to crank up the booze when a drink calls for "Optional Karmotrine" but there is 0 effect on the characters. No drunken dialogue (save for a few secret drunken dialogues) That aspect mostly only plays in if you need to leave it out completely for the rare occasion that someone doesn't want alcohol. It seemed like it was going to be a bit more tongue in cheek to have characters come in with a story and then have the robot bartender be like "Hm, what drink goes with sadness?" or "They seem to have something on their mind, better spike their drink so they can get it off their chest." It gave me the impression that it would be a bit more gameplay driven in terms of choices to let someone be and not get involved or to be heavily involved in terms of getting their gossip/drama. The game we have here is cool mostly because I love the art, but it's severely lacking in meaningful choices and gameplay. It's a visual novel for the most part which isn't necessarily bad but it did fall below my expectations of what I thought the game would be based on looking at the website some years ago. When you get to serve a drink it is straightforward and easy to pull off, which isn't bad but without any payoff it feels pointless. Do you like to put WAY too much Karmotrine? Well that's fine, booze away! But know that it will have no affect on the conversation or your relationship with the character in front of you. "Thanks" is as good as it gets and then you really get the feeling that what little you do has very little impact on the whole. Your character will just do things without indication to the player of what's going on until it's brought up in the conversation. (Like when there is a raid on your apartment building and you bring your cat to work. Nothing gives you any idea that anything is going on and you don't make that decision, it just happens. The city is in turmoil with protesting, rampant hackers, a terrorist attack and the elite law enforcers are crumbling and your bar is closing... and no one is that concerned. Sure, there are questions and some overlap with the people coming and going but other than that everyone is so jaded that it barely affects conversation except with two of the characters. Sei and Stella. "Yeah, it kinda just sucks here." But it's one of the most interesintg aspects of the game. In fact the subplots are the most interesting parts of the game and if you're like me you will hang onto every detail you can get because they are so few and far in between. The things I wante to learn about the most were carefully tucked away with the biggest glaring problem of the game. Jill, the protagonist. If I had a nickel every time the main character got in the way of the actually good stuff. Jill is likeable at first. She's sarcastic and emotionally invested in the people around her, but her problems and motivations are oatmeal. It leaves a Mary Sue taste in my mouth when characters come in and while Jill is being unfirendly all around, they like her anyway and keep coming back. Jill lives in an apartment with her cat, reads blogs and lurks knockoff 4chan threads. She drinks beer alone and smokes in bed. Basically, a very boring person. Despite her need for freedom and to make her own decisions to build her life as she sees fit, she does nothing. She works, drinks and sleeps and even says that she'd stay in the bar until she died. So she's not doing anything with herself and when the game tries to make you take a closer look at her life by dropping an emotional bomb in the mix and it left me apathetic. Who is this person all of a sudden? She's talking about another person that we've had no interactions with in the game. An ex-girlfriend who lived and died off screen therefore making no connections to the player in any shape or form suddenly needs to be important. Jill then gets over it. Sure she says "I feel like a piece of poo" every once in a while, but the point is that I didn't believe her. Her routine doesn't change in any way in the wake of a death that we are supposed to feel had a huge impact on her life. Jill's problems are not interesting and because they are emotionally intangible. As a player there's no room for self insert or empathy because everything is already spelled out. How does someone feel? Read on to find out! Also you rarely even get to look at Jill. She's mostly portrayed through text boxes which doesn't do much to bridge the disconnect between me and her. It's easier to empathize when you can see the person you're meant to empathize with. She wasn't built well enough to be a story vehicle. Anyway, I feel like the game pivoted somewhere for something much less interesting when it comes to interactions and storytelling. It did engage me for the first few hours but as people came and went and it became apparent that making the drinks only affected how much money I made that day I began signing off. Much more interesting things were going on outside of the bar and by the time it came around I had nothing left for Jill. My eyes started rolling in my head, "Oh okay, because you needed a problem too." The pacing is a little weird as well. Some of the crucial points of a characters arc are interrupted with conversations about bust sizes or sexual partners. (Alma, Dorothy...) So which is it? Are we mourning the death of a loved one or are we just insecure and hopelessly romantic? Was that dead person--- ah who cares, I didn't know them anyway. All in all, the game is fine to look at and if you only want to read then sure, pick it up. As someone who followed the game for a while this isn't what I was expecting in terms of execution or storytelling. Gameplay is minimal and pointless except to get back to the conversation and then save. You are not in charge of what you take away as the unimportant details are hamfisted to your brain and the more interesting bits are hidden away to leave you wanting more. EDIT: The original featured art had characters more similar to Betty and Deal before Jill. Now the Betty and Deal art is on the Prologue title's front.Show moreShow less
This game was wrought from the sweat and blood of a couple of weeaboos from the apocalyptic hellscape of Venezuela. It's pretty g̶o̶o̶d̶ great. Buy it. Help them escape.Show moreShow less
VA-11 HALL-A while certainly interesting just misses the mark, failing to set up story arcs, and under utilizing its own mechanics. However many will enjoy it because it’s very quaint and while I don’t give it a general recommendation it is interesting. A friend asked me to try it and it took each of us 17 hours to reach a single ending. For $15 this gives it good value with multiple endings and a new game plus mode. The New Game Plus opens up helpful pointers to discover more endings a feature sorely lacking in other visual novels. The bartending mini-game is a memory test with difficulty adjustment. You can leave the protagonist distracted so that you need to pay more attention or you can spend money to keep the protagonist focused, making the game easier. The drinks you choose to serve and how much alcohol you put in determines the story outcomes. The characters, setting, and dialogue are a creative mish-mash of cyberpunk concepts and current day memes. However I don’t recommend this visual novel because it fails at the most basic of storytelling tasks - setting up a conflict. The game is a collection of subplots surrounding various characters that will take hours simply introducing characters before it begins to drive a story with conflict. Early on there’s a mystery plot (girl in a television) and this is what hooked me only later to realize that it too was just a short subplot in a slow story with slow subplots. VA-11 HALL-A isn’t in anyway timeless, if you aren’t familiar with contemporary internet culture a great deal of the clever jokes will fall flat leaving instead only crude jokes involving cucumbers and santas. It also fails to explain controls (use QWERT to mix drinks) and it doesn’t allow control customization. Finally while the memory serving game is quaint it often does not produce much change in dialogue or outcomes. Only a few choices impact the endings and to explore those endings you’ll get very familiar with the skip dialogue key (also not expressly told to the player). Due to it’s issues I won’t give a general recommendation for VA-11 HALL-A. Which leaves me with a guilty conscience because I’m sure the two Venezuelan dudes who put this together could use the money. If you can look past it’s issues you might find this bizarre and humorous story worth it.Show moreShow less
You know the feeling when you grab yourself a bottle of whiskey, put on your favorite playlist and get all comfortable? Pretty much this game.Show moreShow less
Remember the bar scene from "Seven"? Pitt's and Freeman's characters are talking about the end of investigation that is about to come. But the conversation quickly diverges and both of them start to discuss how they perceive the subject of the investigation from a moral point of view. They talk about how apathy is a solution, how love takes effort, how the weight of evil deeds is incomprehensible... Meanwhile we learn about the characters themselves - Somerset's attitude is questioned by Mills when he points out, that the detective's speech about social indifference is just an excuse to justify his quitting the force. It's a great scene really - a meaningful topic is discussed, and I mean discussed, not disregarded by posing pseudo-existential questions without answers. We learn about our protagonists' convictions and where they come from. Themes of the movie are fleshed out and the talk will heavily impact Somerset's arc. Or a different scene - Murray's and Johansson's characters conversation at the bar in "Lost in Translation". Two people sharing stories of their lives, talking about disappointments, comparing the view of life from perspectives of different ages. No metaphysical discussion this time, only simple dialogue, small talk almost. While it's exchanging mundane experiences on the surface, there are many emotions hidden underneath, glimmers of which we can catch in small gestures, looks, unfinished sentences. All immersed in sounds of clinking glasses, night lights and solitude. Just two people getting to know each other, finding out things they have in common and opening up to each other. I won't say that I was expecting such moments from VA-11 HALL-A, but I was quietly hoping for them. I mean - a cyberpunk dystopia with all it's problems seen from behind the bar - a perfect setting for long in-depth conversations. And the game is basically a visual novel, so it's not like the screenplay was secondary. What could possibly go wrong? Well... First tiny warning sign for me was Jill's wardrobe, namely a t-shirt with "sl*t" written on it. It's like a big "I don't care what anybody thinks about me" announcement, which of course means that the person cares two times as much. Going down the plot road, passing by f-bombs and curse words I've met Mr Donovan. I don't mind swearing that much. It's an occurrence common these days, so it's natural that some characters would use such vocabulary. But Mr Donovan is a whole new specimen. His filthy talk about his sexual relationships is a thing that only a bartender can listen to out of sheer sense of duty. But sometime later Betty came in. And Alma. And Mario. And Streaming-Chan. And *sigh* Dorothy... A great illustration of my problem is the first conversation with Ingram. He starts telling me his story, he speaks about his wife and deceased child, he says that he feels empty, that he misses something crucial... And then he cuts the topic and asks Jill about her sex life. Tommy Wiseau couldn't have done that better. That's the main problem - almost every time the conversation starts getting deep and the topic becomes interesting a few obscene lines have to be thrown in. I felt like listening to a bunch of teenagers who think that being vulgar is a sign of being a grown-up. And it's a shame, because there are intriguing stories hidden between lengthy tasteless descriptions, particularly when Ayanami Rei, I mean, Asagiri Sei enters the scene. Her story about police violence, public service and self-sacrifice is interesting and nuanced. Even on a soap opera level her relationships can tug at your heartstrings. Then again - another good allegory of the whole game - just as I'm getting into Sei's story, Dorothy comes in just to provide a pornographic depiction of her experiences. Luckily I just need to tap spacebar a couple of times to get back to Sei. And that's how the game feels - like a porn magazine with some gripping stories hidden somewhere between pages. Why does it have to be like this? Why almost every time I get engaged someone has to interrupt with-- Wait a second. "VA-11 HALL-A, a booze em' up about waifus, technology, and post-dystopia life". Waifus, waifus... *typing, typing* *reading, reading* Oh... Oh. Man... Wait, wha...? With a squid...? Oh. OH. And what's that? It takes place in the same universe as Read Only Memolgbtqwerty? I take it back. It's not that VA-11 HALL-A throws porn at me half of the time. It's actually doing its best not to throw it at me the other half of the time! The script is in reality full of restraint and tries to elevate the genre above cheap erotic thrills! I guess I've just got the wrong address and that's where the whole misunderstanding came from. Oh well, I'm gonna close my tab in VA-11 HALL-A now. There was some good cyberpunk bar down the road, what was it again... Ah yes, Seamstresses Union. I wonder how Mr Kluwe is doing.Show moreShow less
I've fallen in love with a fictional character. Again.Show moreShow less
I completed this game and while there are positive and negative aspects to this game, I will have to give it a thumbs down. I'm somewhat sad to give this game a negative review, as it genuinely has charm to it. The art style and music are great. I like the concept of a bartender simulator. Those positives being noted, I felt there was missed potential. My biggest complaint would be the writing. Perhaps I am older than the target audience, but I felt the writing was fairly boring. I found myself skipping over conversations related to "lore" as the world felt relatively uninspired and irrelevant to the interactions in the bar. There was an excess of seemingly out of place immature sexual comments. I understand that this is largely related to personal taste, but this game is first and foremost a visual novel (and the story and writing are the main points to review). On to the "gameplay" elements: I felt it was a strange decision to not give any incentives to make drinks fast or to make them without reviewing the recipe book. In fact, I felt absolutely no pressure from the bartending aspect of the game. If I by chance threw in the wrong amount of an ingredient, the drink would show it was incorrect before I served it. I could then "reset" the drink and remake it without any negative consequences. Overall I would suggest you can give this game a try if you understand it is a "visual novel" much more than a "game", and if you can tolerate the game being light, quirky, and somewhat immature. If that sounds off putting to you, I'd say pass.Show moreShow less
Cracking Open a Cold One With the Boss (´• ω •`)Show moreShow less
So I picked up VA-11 Hall-A. Immediately I was drawn in. Bartending? With a cyberpunk motif? With great music? With actually good western anime-styled art? With that beautiful dithering I love so much, reminiscent of PC-98 graphics but with a modern twist? And with constant chan culture references to make me feel at home? This must be what getting pandered to feels like. It’s a first for me. I booted it up and was wowed by the intro movie. These guys know how to draw you into the game. After about 13 hours I finished it, so here are my thoughts. I intend to be thorough so it might be a little long. First, what I like about the game. Cyberpunk is a super underused concept and combining that with bartending is a really great idea so that you can meet a large variety of characters. The art, like I mentioned, is really great; PC-98 art has always fascinated me but most of the games from that era aren’t worth your while so it’s lovely to see that style used in a modern game. The soundtrack is also pretty great. Everything fits the cyberpunk style well and is perfect as BGM. I might say that there aren’t too many standout tracks that I would listen to outside of the game but it still is full of solid compositions. The writing at its best is snappy and interesting, and many characters’ backstories are well-crafted. And the secondary parts of the game in the “room” segments are fun distractions from the main story. Unfortunately there is also a lot I don’t like about the game. And despite largely being a visual novel much of this is related to the gameplay. First, possibly my largest complaint about the gameplay itself is that it is oh so shallow. You get a drink requested, you do the braindead task of dragging and dropping the 5 ingredients into the shaker, you serve it. It does not require any creativity or skill and is just busywork. If one asks the question “why is the gameplay even there?” the obvious answer is just to avoid it being a pure visual novel and more of a “game” in order to get more attention from the public. It feels like gameplay for the sake of gameplay and it detracts from the experience. I would have much preferred the gameplay either scaled up or scaled down: either implement bartending mechanics with depth, possibly even teaching me something about actual bartending, or take them out altogether and just give me a VN. Don’t make me do this lego blocks crap, it’s tedious. The controls aren’t great either, as strange as that sounds when talking about a visual novel. Dragging and dropping the ingredients with mouse movement takes way too much time, so sooner or later you probably will discover that you can find a sweetspot on the edge of the drink selection boxes where clicking will have your mouse high up enough to select the drink, but also down low enough where releasing your click will drop the drink into the shaker, allowing you to just spam click to add the ingredients. This is okay for 3/5 of the ingredients, but for the two “corner” ingredients Adelhyde and Pwd Delta, it is very easy to screw this up and select a different ingredient instead, screwing up the order and making you start all over again. One might make the argument that this adds a little skill to the gameplay, but again, in reality it’s just tedious. I found myself wishing that there were a faster, better way to add ingredients… and, after I finished the game, I found one, thanks to reading a few Steam reviews! The keyboard keys QWERT correspond to the five ingredients and pressing one just adds it to the shaker. Firstly, why the hell did I have to read Steam reviews to find this out? It wasn’t even in the settings menu, which I always check before starting any game. Secondly, why QWERT in the first place? How about AQWED - the ingredients on the screen are arranged in an upside-down U formation so this would be a much more intuitive layout. But of course it doesn’t let you rebind keys either so you’ll be stuck with the default keybindings, if you even knew they existed in the first place. Another large problem with the gameplay is the jukebox. I have no complaints with the music itself but the implementation is not great. The track listings are in seemingly random order and there is no re-sorting them by some criteria like number of plays or alphabetical order. And, while not an essential feature, there are no ways of noting which songs you liked, such as a 5-star rating system or something. Within the tracklist, the locked songs are scattered throughout the 12 pages of tracks so upon leafing through them you aren’t going to remember which have been recently unlocked and which you already had. And, somehow - maybe it’s just me, since I haven’t seen this complaint elsewhere - the jukebox controls are bad! For some reason when I try to right-click on tracks in my playlist to delete them and make room for other tracks, it just doesn’t work. The hit detection is screwed up. I find myself having to spam right-click thirty times on a track to get it to delete. All of these factors combined made me never want to use the jukebox again, so I didn’t. I imagine the idea behind the jukebox was to encourage the user to get intimately acquainted with the songs to deepen their experience, but for me it backfired. About a quarter through the game I said “screw it,” picked 12 songs that seemed to be the least grating, and went with that playlist for the entire rest of the game to avoid jukeboxing. Even though I should like the soundtrack based on the songs themselves, it ended up getting grating because listening to only these 12 for the whole rest of the game made me get tired of them. Rather than the current implementation I would have appreciated either a traditional hands-off approach with character themes and such auto-playing, or at least an option to put the entire track suite on shuffle instead of just the 12 in the playlist at the time. And then there is the story and writing - two separate aspects so I will cover them separately. The story is interesting at first, drawing you into the world well with lots of interesting subplots, but most of them fizzle out or have very open-ended endings. And the main plot line isn’t much better. The denouement is disappointing and scenes that should be somewhat emotional end up falling flat. Most of the plot in this story falls under the category of having a good beginning, decent middle, and meh end, which doesn’t leave a very strong impression. And the writing - quite a mixed bag. Like I mentioned earlier, when it’s good, it’s quite good and enjoyable. But when it’s not, it’s… what’s the opposite of pretentious? VA-11 Hall-A is definitely not pretentious, so at least it has that going for it. But in its efforts to be down-to-earth, it also lacks aspiration to be something truly great, can be eye-rollingly unsubtle in its delivery, and sometimes sacrifices its integrity for external references. I can’t really substantiate these views in detail without going through and rereading the story, picking out examples as I go along, which I’d rather not do, so instead here are three specific examples that stuck out in my mind as not being too great. (continued in comments, went a little over char limit)Show moreShow less
Source: original Steam user reviews. Helpful votes are an archived snapshot, not live data. Last collected: 08/15/2026.