Techno Banter almost put us off at the first juncture because of the name alone. Banter. It’s such an insipid word. Used to excuse all kinds of boorish behaviour by awful knuckle dragging idiots. Bullying if you ask us. Thankfully it’s just a name as it turns out that Techno Banter is quite intriguing. Coming from Berlin-based dev Dexai Arts and publisher Crunching Koalas, it’s a bouncer simulator of sorts.
Playing as Nill, a dog faced anthropomorphic heavy, you start in the penthouse of a posh guy called Bidenhander. An entrepreneurial type of sorts, you see a party in his penthouse as the opportunity to pitch your idea for a new product. Only he sees it as overstepping your boundaries and promptly fires you.
As luck would have it, your ex-boss from the club you once worked at as a doorman has come calling so you find yourself back working the door at the Green Door club. Said club has a nice line in underground techno, apparently from real world Berlin acts. Though we’re old so we’d be just as happy with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Can or Kraftwerk inspired tunes. Either way, the music is excellent here.
Your day starts in the crummy little apartment you seem to rent that also doubles up as a save point and a place to change your outfits that you might unlock. This is by no means a given though, as we only unlocked two outfits by the end of our playthrough. The main action takes place on the strip outside the club with all manner of denizens to discover. If we had one complaint about this area, a couple of key areas are hidden down a particularly difficult to spot back alley that we didn’t spot until it was too late in our first playthrough to make a difference.
As well as the Green Door club, there’s a comedy club, a launderette and an all-night pharmacy to name a few of the locations. The launderette is where you unlock extra outfits by handing in laundry coupons to claim the items from the grumpy woman that runs the place. Think Pauline Fowler off Eastenders with better hair and you’ll be on the right track.
The pharmacy has a gregarious lady who will heal you as well as make smalltalk. It might be a little lost in translation, but we swear she also had a nice line in flirting with Nill into the bargain.
After a while, you’ll run out of people to interact with meaningfully, though there are still sidequests aplenty, many of which are entirely dependent on your dialogue choices. Or in latter cases, your skillset that you’ll have hopefully levelled up the right attributes sufficiently.
Then you’ll get to the club itself and get down to brass tacks. You’re briefed by your boss to not let particular character types into the club, mostly obvious things like obviously drunk people or creepy sorts. You’ll have to filter them out by observing them to work out character traits then make the call whether to let them into the club or not. This is a little reminiscent of Papers, Please though unlike that, you’ll be expected to occasionally resort to physical violence with the more aggressive would-be guests. This takes the form of minigames where you have to dodge attacks. A little simplistic perhaps, but a Final Fight type brawler would be unrealistic to expect instead.
In the event you lose a fight though, some bad apples will get into the club regardless. This is particularly galling when you’ve not set a foot wrong otherwise, so it feels a bitter pill to swallow when one guest can pull your otherwise impeccable score down. Do well on a queue and you’ll gain upgrade points to improve your club, do badly and at the very worst you’ll get a game over screen somewhat prematurely. At least that yields a trophy in that regard.
Inside the club you’ll have the opportunity to meet guests you’ve admitted and colleagues, some of whom you’ll get on better with than others. One is the custodian who cleans the bar and restrooms and the other is your predecessor as the head doorman who isn’t too happy at your return. After this, you’ll be gently shepherded towards Gunthy’s office at which point you’ll get scored for your doorman efforts and awarded with the aforementioned upgrade points if you’re good enough. then you fade to black, leaving the club via the rear exit and heading back to your apartment when you begin the daily cycle again.
Given the plot driven nature of Techno Banter, we can’t really discuss too much otherwise. But it does highlight the fact that we had the feeling on several occasions that the plot was carrying on regardless of our actions on multiple occasions, not least one pivotal sequence during what amounts to the endgame.
Despite that feeling, we had a lot more fun with Techno Banter than we expected to. It feels a little slight admittedly, though we didn’t twig that there were some binary options with related trophies until we’d passed those points. They don’t feel as annoying as those from Fallout: New Vegas where a faction choice can exclude entire branches of the storyline. But neither do we feel massively compelled to go back and redo the story to have another crack. At least not yet anyway.
In conclusion, Techno Banter is a fun story-driven bouncer-em-up with a contemplative philosophical feel at times, but also one in which your path feels utterly predetermined and nothing you can do can alter that trajectory. It’s still worth playing, not to mention the excellent music.
Summary
Techno Banter is more than a bouncer take on Papers, Please. It’s well written and while the plot might feel like it is advancing no matter what you do, you’ll come away feeling glad for having played it. It has the feel of a one and done, but many plotlines will remain untouched if you only play this the once. Additionally, the music is excellent.
