Visual Reference

("What am I looking at?")


Instructions on how to move and interact with game elements are included at the bottom of the game, between the score (on the left; drop to zero!) and the elapsed in-game time (on the right; increases as you serve customers and switch teas).

Detailed Lore

("Why am I, the protagonist, angry, and what am I doing about it?")

(A short summary is included in the game.)

You've been working as a server for the tea shops (featured in Tea Run and Tea Time) run silently and on strange rules by an eccentric teamaker renowned worldwide for making excellent tea. The procedures are weird, but the pay, benefits, and focus on work-life balance can't be beat anywhere in the industry. By now you could retire if you wanted to, but the challenges of working here and still getting customers their desired flavors of tea keep you coming back.

But the teamaker has kids, and the kids, now adults, have very different ideas about how the franchise should be run. They're opening a shop, trading on their parent's name and fame, where every policy that doesn't directly turn a profit for them is jettisoned. The workers' comp and health insurance is a joke. You can take time off, if you get a co-worker to cover your shift. You never thought you'd miss the water features of your old garden-style tea shop, but you definitely do when you show up to familiarize yourself before the grand opening and see the fire features that are supposed to keep the faux-stone dungeon-like shop lit. And the way the pension fund is structured seems suspiciously embezzlable.

After all the work you've put into building the teamaker's vision into the well-run chain of shops it is today, there's no way you're going to put any effort into helping this place exploit the workers and exploit the teamaker's good name. In fact, you've decided it's your duty to do your absolute best to drive this place right into the ground as quickly as possible, and the grand opening seems like the best time to get started...

Of course, there's limits to what you can do to sabotage this place. If you were to get yourself arrested, for instance, by attacking customers or destroying property, the arrest would be the big story; it might even make people more keen to check the place out. No, you're going to have to limit yourself to serving tea like you've never served tea before (at least on purpose): badly. Botch orders. Ignore customers. Cheerfully serve to whole tables flavors of tea that no one sitting at them wants. Ruin the shop's borrowed reputation as quickly as you can: the future of the franchise, and your fellow workers, depends on it.

Development log

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