Many Welps

I got an email the other day from Greenheart Games that the demo for their new game, Tavern Keeper, was available. Admittedly, I didn’t actually read the email, just skimmed the subject and kept a mental note to check it out some time. Had I read the email, I would have known this was a limited time demo ending on July 29th. Lucky for me, because of the recent changes to Demos on Steam, the demo was extended for a few days. I couldn’t track down the new end date of the demo, though I didn’t try harder than clicking on the latest game news in Steam. If it’s a game you want to take a look at, you should probably check it out sooner rather than later.

You might know Greenheart Games for their last successful venture, Game Dev Tycoon circa 2013. That’s one of those games that’s always recommended when I’m trawling Reddit for “recent” tycoon games. I played it, it’s holds up to the hype, it’s on mobile, PC, Switch, and Netflix – wait Netflix has games now?

I digress, I’m here to talk about the demo for Tavern Keeper!

Do you like cozy, fantasy vibes? I like cozy fantasy, vibes and Tavern Keeper’s got ’em. The graphic’s are of the inoffensive, cartoony variety. Though, the people don’t seem to have arms connecting their wrists to their shoulders which is, well, a little unnerving. And the music! The music is lush and warm and makes me want to curl up with a book in front of a large fire place. If there’s a soundtrack I will buy it, without question, on release.

You’ve probably already guessed the premise of the game. You run a Tavern. Surprise! But not a serious tavern, no this is a rather silly place. Full of parody’s of fantasy characters and staff who were fired from their last job for impersonating the elderly. The writing is full of quipy, quips made even better when narrated by our Narrator, Steven Pacey. I didn’t know who that was but when I got around to reading the demo announcement email it says:

You might know Steven’s work from the many audio-books he narrates, for example from Joe Abercrombie’s fantasy works, and several books of the Doctor Who bibliography, to name just a few. Recently, he’s also been featured on House of the Dragon, World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth, and Love, Death & Robots.

Well I don’t know Steven’s work, but I would sure like to. Now, if you’ll excuse me for a moment, I have a bunch of audio books to put on hold.

There are some patron’s who you can interact with via a book above their head. There are two of these in the demo and they are read and voiced by the Narrator. You have two choices at the end of every page that seem like they are the “Nice Response” and the “Mean Response”. Depending on your choices different events can happen. With the narration as good as it is, I’m definitely looking forward to going through more of these on release.

I can see this style of writing and parody wearing thin for some after a while. Personally, I think it’s great and want more of it/ It’s like a family friendly version of Hello from the Magic Tavern.

Along with managing your staff and ordering ale from the traveling merchant, you are tasked with decorating the place. Now I’m not a huge fan of free form building systems, and especially not ones where every piece can be move around on an x,y,z axis. I’m just not that creative. But if you do like that, Tavern Keeper seems to do it pretty well.

Look I made this owl with a top hat and placed a rug underneath the table and it wasn’t horrible:

You can also do some wonky things, like create the tavern’s new Teapot overlord:

The UI can get cluttered at times. It didn’t get in my way of doing things but with a bunch of menus up things can get a little claustrophobic. I also found it slightly confusing when I unlocked some furniture but couldn’t use it in the demo.

Overall, the demo did it’s job. My interest in Tavern Keeper has been peeked and I have not removed the game from my wishlist all in under an hour of game time. You can tell they’re holding some systems and menus back from the demo. There are still some menus that are boarded up and haven’t been unlocked during the demo. Furniture and items seem to have a durability meter so maybe they can break. It also looks like things can be set on fire so I’m interested to see how that all plays out. It looks like Tavern Keeper will have some added complexity over Game Dev Tycoon with more resources to manage. But it looks like it will maintain the cozy, chill vibe, that Game Dev Tycoon has as well. With that said, it’s not an immediate buy for me right now when it releases in Early Access at the end of this year. I’m not in the market for a tycoon game at the moment but in a few months I might be.