To everyone out there participating in Blaugust, I hope it’s going well for you! Especially now as we round past the halfway point and into the back half of the month aka where streaks go to die. Atleast for me.
But not this year!
No, that’s because I haven’t been on a streak this month. I am signed up for Blaugust, yes, but I had no intentions of reaching 31 posts or 20, or 15. A humble 10 would do for me but it’s looking like even that may be too much as I hit publish on my fifth post this month.
It feels different, not racing towards 31 posts with everyone else. While Blaugust isn’t about the number of posts, it is a community event. By declining to even consider posting daily, I feel as though I might be missing out on some of that communal malaise (misery?) that comes with week three of writing everyday.
Perhaps what I’m feeling is the lack of stress that comes when there isn’t an expectation of posting everyday!
This isn’t to say that, by not participating to the fullest, I feel I’m missing out on the amazing Blaugust community that comes with this event every year (really all year long – stick around you’ll see). You won’t see me on the Blaugust Discord too often, I am a lurker by nature and spend most of time reading there and not so much engaging, but as the number of bloggers have grown, I’ve seen the community there has only gotten stronger. It continues to be an incredible group of people supporting each other through through a tough challenge and coming together for the shared love of writing words on the internet.
Outside of August, I tend to stick close to the video game blogosphere and don’t venture out too far. This year, I made it a goal to focus more on reading the blogs of Blaugust, rather than writing my own. My feed has been a treasure trove to sift through each day and sample new voices from the void of the internet. I have encountered ideas, topics, and musings that I would not have discovered otherwise.
While Blaugust has been different for me this year, my enjoyment of the event has not. But I do find myself craving a bit of that “what am I going to blog about today?” energy. So instead of breaking the streak during the third week of August, maybe I’ll start one, just for a little while…
See that guy over there, bitten to death by a wet giant centipede? Yep, that’s me. You’re probably wondering how I got here.
Well would you look at that, I’m actually keeping up with a plan for once! Well, one post a plan does not make but – it’s a start.
So here I am, finally starting up Caves of Qud, or at least going back through the tutorial. I did this before, a few times actually, but this time I took notes! And the controls are weird, (no “Press WASD to move” here!) so I needed a refresher.
Ok, so maybe not weird for Roguelike but weird for me.
I can’t recall a game that I’ve played in the past that uses the NumPad as directional. In the context of a 2D, grid based, world it makes sense. 8 for up, 4 for left, 2 for down, 6 for right, and 7,9,1,and 3 to move diagonally. As I write this, I am noticing my NumPad actually has arrows on these keys, just in case I forget.
The arrow keys can also be used but having to press shift+arrow key to move diagonally doesn’t feel great. The mouse can also be used to move, in fact, you can play the whole game with just the mouse, but some actions take a lot of clicks and learning the keyboard shortcuts seems like it will be quicker overall.
Plus they make me feel like I’m playing some bespoke relic of the past and that’s fun in and of itself.
Back to the tutorial!
The tutorial let me know that building a character in Caves of Qud was somewhat of a process and we certainly don’t have time for that. This is a tutorial after all.
I was presented with 6 pre-made characters but was only offered the choice of one, the Marsh Taur. Part human part marsh! Well, actually, I think it’s just a human with four legs but it shoots freezing rays out of its hands and can run down enemies from great distances. Probably on account of having four legs. From the description it is the most survivable starting build. If that’s the case, I have my work cut out for me here….
Choosing a character, I was plopped into one of the titular caves “powdered in salt and dust from across the ribbon of time”. I learned how to move, how to fight, and how to look at things.
I’ve played a decent amount of Tales of Maj’eyal so I am familiar with the style of Qud’s turn based combat system. using L to look and choosing which tile to look at took some time to get used to. I could also right click with the mouse but taking my hands off the keyboard to do so is a bit weird. From playing TOME, I also kept wanting to press Z to auto explore which doesn’t do anything. Qud seems to be more about exploring where as TOME is more focused on getting you to the next fight.
I fought some Snapjaws which are a type of humonoid/dog pack hunting monsters. After my victory, I fought a wounded bear. That’s right, I,the mighty Marsh Taur was able to defeat a badly wounded bear!
I also leaned how to pick things up and equip them. The inventory screen is the one place that I’m using the mouse. There are too many key presses there to equip or unequip something and it’s way easier to just drag it to an equipment slot like every other game.
Eventually, I found a the stair well out of the cave and was taken to the world map which , to be frank, is kind of hard to look at:
In fact, that’s one part of the game that has taken a lot of getting used to. It’s kind of hard to see what’s going on and to tell what something is from a glance. I’m sure the more I play I’ll understand what things are, but as it stands, I am constantly “looking” at things to see if they are friend, enemy, item, or perhaps just a tree.
After emerging on to the surface, the tutorial had me go to the town of Joppa where it abruptly ended. Leaving me in town to figure out what to do next. I found a guy who gave me a quest. When I doubt do a quest. There was a creature eating the watervines of Joppa in Red Rock and I was tasked with defeating it.
So I set off, two squares to the north of town on the world map to look for this mysterious creature. When I arrived, I was immediately attacked by a pack of rock throwing baboons. I fired my frost ray at one but it has quite the cool down so I was forced to chased the monkeys through the fields and a volley of rocks to take them out one, by one with my axe. After killing one or two, I started picking up the rocks they were throwing and throwing them back. Take that!
I wandered around for a bit to see where I was suppose to go next. I’m not sure if it’s one to one but I did confirm that traveling between screens does move you around the world map eventually. I ended up two squares away from Red Rock by the time I realized I wasn’t going the right way. On my return to Red Rock via the world map, I found a stair case down to a cave.
Entering the cave I saw a cave spider which I quickly dispatched with a few tossed rocks. Then I encountered an amoeba which didn’t seem to do much damage but left my weapon Slimy after it was defeated. I couldn’t tell what the Slimy status did other than leave a trail of slime behind me for a while.
Further into the cave I encountered two snap jaw scavengers. It turns out, my freezing ray does damage in a line up to 9 squares so I was able to take out both snapjaws with one blast!
Feeling confident, I ventured further into the cave and found a wet feral dog. Looking at it told me that it was friendly. I walked over to it to see what my interaction options were. I could talk, trade, pet, attack, or examine. Talking to it and trading it did not produce results. I did pet it a couple times hoping it might join me on my quest. While I was petting the dog, I was attacked by a centipede.
It’s just a centipede, how hard could it be right? Ok, it’s a giant centipede, but still…Frost Ray! Dismember! Still not dead? I’ll just attack it one more time. But, alas, it was one time too many. The mighty Marsh Taur fell after about 30 minutes.
I have a lot to learn if I’m going to keep playing this….
It’s the first day of Blaugust! One of my favorite days of the year. It’s awesome to watch my RSS feed fill up with posts, more posts than I could ever hope to read. It’s always fun to check out the new blogs that join the event and see blogs from past events come back to life (hey, kinda like this one!).
If you haven’t been to my blog before, Hi, I’m Kluwes! Apparently, I’ve been blogging for nine years. I could have sworn it was only six or seven. Must have lost count a few years ago! I tend to write about video games but I’ve been known to wander on to some other topics sometimes. Not much has changed since the last time I wrote and introduction post so I’ll go ahead a quote myself from last year:
“I’m Kluwes, this is my blog Many Welps. I write about video games and sometimes fiction podcasts/audio dramas. What you’ll find here are mostly accounts of play sessions either on my own or with my friends (like this). They’re my favorite blog posts to read and also my favorite to write! You’ll also find summaries of games that I finish in my Backlogged posts which I don’t like to call reviews but kind of end up being them anyways.”
I don’t have much of a plan for Blaugust this year. I won’t rule it out from the get go, but, I have a strong suspicion I will not be getting anywhere close to 31 posts this year. Possibly 10? That sounds like a reasonable goal. Let’s do that.
While thinking of something interesting I could do for Blaugust this year(interesting for me at least), I have come up with this idea to take the month to play and learn a complex game that I would typically bounce from and write about it along the way. My first thought was Crusader Kings 3, but I had played a number of hours of that already and I wanted something fresh to dive into. I scrolled through my library and passed Dwarf Fortress which I’ve never played but I didn’t know if I wanted something quite that complex for this. I was searching for something in that vein though that’s outside my normal gaming wheelhouse and might give me some good stories to tell.
I came across Caves of Qud, a roguelike with a science fantasy setting, some weird lore, and lots of procedural generation. It also plays out like an RPG rather than just a quick run type game. It seems complex enough for my idea but not too complex that I’ll get frustrated with it. Maybe dying over and over again will get to me, but there’s a Roleplay mode where there are some checkpoints to prevent permadeath.
With Caves of Qud in mind, I went down the rabbit hole to see what other “traditional roguelikes” were out there. Here’s what I found:
Originally released in 1994, ADOM seems to be one of the biggest roguelike influences out there, well aside from Rogue that is. There’s a steam version with updated graphics (i.e not ACSII). According to the steam page, it’s most known for being the first roguelike with towns, NPCs, and a rich story. It could be a fun one to take a look at in the future. The map has graphics, the menus are still all DOS looking and text based which gives it an interesting flare. Sometimes it’s fun to go play an old game just to see how far things have come. It makes it a bit more enticing when the old game has had a graphical face lift as well.
I have played many, many hours of TOME and I am not even close to unlocking everything the game has to offer. This one is like a diablo dungeon crawl roguelike with tons of classes, races, skills and loot. So much loot. It’s also known for being the Steam game with 1700+ steam achievements. It’s an open source game, free to play here on it’s site but also available along with it’s DLC for purchase on Steam. It’s a fun game, but maybe not the right candidate for this idea. For one, I’ve already played it and it’s more of a tacticle dungeon crawl with less random RPG elements.
Another open source, free to play rougelike that always seems to pop up in recommendations as I’ve been searching to learn more about roguelikes. I downloaded it, since it’s free, and did the first tutorial, but I haven’t done much else. From everything I’ve read, it’s a very balanced game but, like TOME, more of a tactical dungeon crawl, as the name would suggest, rather than an RPG.
This one is more of a survival game than an RPG. It’s a post-apocalypse zombie/horror themed game where the goal is to survive in a procedurally generated world. It’s another game that I downloaded, ran a bit of the tutorial and put aside for now. It seems to meet the complexity requirement and the procedural storytelling element I’m looking for so it could be a candidate.
Elin is the sequel to a game called Elona. It’s an open world sandbox with a JRPG flavor and base management. You can play roguelike Stardew Valley or go out and be a standard adventurer. You can even be a piano playing snail…I played a bit of the demo and it seems like a strong contender for this little project. It seems like a mix or resource management, dungeon crawl, and sandbox RPG all in one, wrapped in JRPG graphics.
From everything I’ve read, Caves or Qud is going to be the closest to what I’m looking for in terms of complexity and procedural story telling while still being an RPG. It also has a unique theme and an interesting world full of things to discover. I have run through the tutorial and I am intrigued to see where this game goes. It’s probably going to be the winner here but I will try out a few of the others before I commit to the choice.
Out of all of these, Caves of Qud and Elin are my top contenders for this excersie. My idea is to go in blind and only use the information the game gives me. No guides outside the tool tips in game and the tutorial. I’m still leaning towards Caves of Qud, it’s got a weird setting and a unique look that intrigues me. But I also am a sucker for Elin’s JRPG style. I’ll play through the tutorial for both of these and decide when it’s time to start this thing!
Whew, I can’t believe August is over already. With it go the last remnants of summer. Break out the Halloween decorations! Take out those hoodies! Bring on the Pumpkin Spice EVERYTHING!!
I love Fall, can you tell? Summer is great and all but we only get so many months of warm weather in Northeast Ohio so we tend to try and pack in as much outdoor activities as possible. This summer was full of concerts, trips to the zoo and the beach and then back to the zoo. Every weekend was booked from the end of May until right now. I’m so ready for a nice break.
I took part in Blaugust this year which was a rousing success. I skipped last year completely, so it was nice to rejoin the event again. My participation was for wholly selfish reasons, to inspire me to write more than I have been. Considering I’m writing this post, I’d say that was a success. I managed to write 22 posts last month which was above and beyond the goal of 10-15 posts I set for myself at the start of things.
Spending all of my time on my own writing meant I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked to check out other blogs participating this year, especially all the new ones. When I did, I tended to stick to the blogs I’ve been reading for years anyways. It’s something I would like to work on for next year for sure.
My initial thought is, if I spend more time throughout the year writing I won’t feel compelled to cram it all in one month..or…and hear me out on this one….I might be able to plan better and give myself more time to read all those other blogs. Time will tell!
As always, thank you Belghast for organizing and putting on this awesome event year after year!
Top 5 Games in August
Game
Hours
Total % of Time Played
Guild Wars 2
20h
47%
No Man’s Sky
11.5h
27%
Dragon Age: Origin
7.5h
18%
Hunt: Showdown
2h
5%
Disney Dreamlight Valley
1.5h
3%
I’m going to be honest, I didn’t think I’d have enough games to fill this chart this month.
I knew Guild Wars 2 and Dragon Age: Origins would be up there because I’ve written a bunch of posts about those. No Man’s Sky being in second was a bit of a shock. I know I wrote a few posts about it too but if you asked me to guess before I put together this list I would have said Dragon Age would be higher. It makes sense though, it was the Squads’ weekend game this month.
I gave Hunt: Showdown another try this month and it fell flat for me. I don’t think I’ll be returning to it anytime soon even though it does have an awesome soundtrack. Disney Dreamlight Valley was vying for 5th against 3 other games that had a little less than an hour in them but the new Star Path that came out this month has had me logging in to the game every few days for a quick check. Earlier this year, it would have been higher on the list but my interest in that particular genre has waned since the beginning of summer.
September 2024 Goals
Finish the Heart of Thorns story. This one is a bit of a gimmie because I’m pretty sure I’m nearing the end of it anyways.
Continue my Dragon Age: Origins play through. I’m not naive enough to think that I will be anywhere close to finishing this game by the end of the month. Who knows, I may never start it up again. Such are the whims of my interests!
Don’t go dormant! aka post at least 1 time a week in September. Now that I’m back at it, I don’t want to lose momentum but I also don’t want to set a goal to high for myself the first month post Blaugust. Boom! Got the first week covered already.
Bonus Goal: Finish the Living World Season 3 because I think I’m very close – very, very, very close to the end of Heart of Thorns already…
A few months ago I saw the entire Dragon Age franchise on sale for like $15. At the time, I wasn’t looking for a big fantasy RPG of any sort let alone three. But I know me so I scooped it up for the inevitable day that I would be compelled to play it. That day has come. It was apparently last night.
This 1000% has to do with all of the news I keep seeing about The Veilgaurd coming out this October. Also because I can’t seem to do anything unless I make it into a project. So of course I’m like “Let’s play all of the Dragon Age games! I totally have time for that!” (I probably don’t…)
So there I was, creating a new characters in Dragon Age: Origins and reflecting back on my time with the series as a whole. Well – not really – but I needed a way to somehow segue into this next part! I make no claim that any of the following is actually accurate, I’m just jotting down what I remember, I didn’t bother to fact check anything other than the dates the games came out.
Dragon Age: Origins was one of the first games I played through on the PS3. I must have gotten it over winter break of my freshman year of college because by the time I picked up the physical copy, it was the ultimate edition. Fun fact, I used the remaining balance of my meal plan that semester to buy it.
What I remember most about Dragon Age were the commercials leading up to the games release. I distinctly remember seeing one at the movies is somewhere in between those Maria Menounos Noovie things they played before the trailers. Grey Wardens looked awesome! A fantasy game that wasn’t Lord of The Rings!
What I remember from my first playthrough of the game? Not a whole lot. I remember Alaistar, the swamp witch lady, a particularly challenging boss fight with a very large boss, and speccing my character out to be a sword and board warrior. That last part was my favorite, I liked that I could be an actual tank for my party taunting enemies and knocking them down. It wasn’t a role I played a lot of in other RPGs, preffering characters who used a bow over melee. I also remember the combat feeling like a tab targetting MMO complete with a big hot bar with lots of skills that somehow was manageable on a controller. I thought that was pretty cool too!
Other than that, I couldn’t tell you much about the story. Something about the templars hunting down mages maybe? But then, that might have been a bigger plot point in Dragon Age 2 which I also played, though never finished. I did finish Dragon Age: Origins. Spent plenty of nights that winter break sitting in front of the living room TV plodding my way through. I did start the DLC, but I think around that time, classes had started back up. I never got back to it and just played Dragon Age 2 the next summer.
Dragon Age 2 I remember being more of an action game. Less create your own character and more you’re going to play our character but you can change their looks and pick their class. I don’t know how true that is, it’s been ten plus years since I played it. I think the main character actually had voice lines which I always preffered over the Silent Protagonist type.
For that game, I switched it up and played a mage. Again, I think a big plot point of that game was outlawing mages or something so I thought it was an interesting background to try out. I distinctly remember being a gravity mage that pulled enemies together and flung them all over the place while my party wailed on them. Good times.
Dragon Age: Inquisition dropped the fall of 2014, the year I graduated from college and had just started living with my then girlfriend/now wife. It wasn’t a game that was on my radar anymore, I had fallen off of gaming in general during college, well except for League of Legends. We played a lot of that.
I think my mom gifted it to me for Christmas that year. I distincly remember creating a character in the likeness of my now-father inlaw which my now-wife did not find it the least bit funny. I, on the other hand, found it very amusing…I remember some cutscenes, an interegation of sorts, then being thrown out into the world and not getting very far.
You know what also released in the fall of 2014? Destiny. That had a hold on me for at least a year and there wasn’t’ much time for anything else.
The Squad has been picking our way through the latest expedition which is set to end on September 2nd. So far, most of us have made it to Phase 4 out of 5.
This Expedition is suppose to take you through worlds that showcase the latest graphical and procedural generation update. We have visited some interesting places, my favorite being the starting world with a giant floating eye creature and islands floating everywhere. We’ve also seen planets made up of mostly water with huge waves and even bigger underwater creatures. Other planets may not have been memorable but they did show off the new flora and fauna combinations.
The Liquidators Expedition focuses heavily on combat. Each phase of the expedition has you traveling to a drop zone, which spawn bug creatures that you need to eliminate. Then you have to travel to an infestation site to shoot even bigger bug creatures! Each phase has an optional goal of killing x number of bug creatures too.
There’s been a whole lot of shooting things the last few weeks.
Combat, inherintly, lends itself as a great multiplayer activity. It’s certainly easier to take on the swarms with a few friends. There isn’t much structure to it, nothing to really plan for, just go out there and shoot the bugs until there aren’t any more bugs! The big boss bugs add some variety, they have armor that needs to be shot off before they take damage so there’s an option for coordination but it’s not strictly required.
The shared Milestones for each phase of the expedition also lean in to a more focused multiplayer experience. It would be nice if these were actually shared between the party playing together so each person didn’t have to go to their own drop zone, or collect their own eggs, or take out their own number of bugs, but it’s something. Inevitably there is some waiting around while every one finishes up their milestones for the current phase. It does give us all something to work towards together which is more than I can say for the normal game.
With that said, the expedition does kind of speed run you through the different features of No Man’s Sky that we haven’t seen before. Things like Frieghters, mechs, and other exocraft that can maybe serve as goals for us to chase together when we do go back to the main game. I still think the Nexus missions will give us more focused goals to persue together too, we just haven’t tried them yet.
Well, well, well, we’re a bit late for this post that was suppose to be published last Sunday aren’t we? Yes, yes we are….
But that’s ok, this whole positing daily thing was starting to drive me a little crazy. I felt like I fell behind and then couldn’t keep up. Quite frankly, I was starting to get a little obsessive. So I took a small break – okay a bigger break than I intended – and that felt great. It silenced the little gremlin in my head that said you can’t stop now you’re halfway to 31 posts! But I did stop, and now with a bit of a gap, a lot of self imposed pressure I was feeling went away. I notoriously drop off during the aptly named “Staying Motivated Week”, I tend to take too long of a break and then it’s September. Wasn’t trying to do that this year! (Nearly did though…)
This leads me to one of those lesson’s I tend to learn every year. Daily blogging isn’t for me. It’s a fun challenge but it’s not sustainable for me. Especially coming off of a, more or less, 2 year blogging break. I’ve been trying to find some sort of posting schedule here since I started this thing. At this point, that just might be whenever I fell like it. Though, this event always shows me that I enjoy writing a whole lot and should try to do it more often.
As a whole, Blaugust has been good for me. I have written more in the last month than I have in the last two years which feels great. I’ve already exceeded the goal I set for myself in the beginning of all this. I’m feeling confident that I can finish the month strong with a few more posts!
Hello out there! I don’t usually post on the weekends but during Blaugust I find that having some sort of re-occuring feature helps cover those days. So that’s what this is.
We are now at the end of week two, our first full week of Blaugust. Traditionally. “Lessons Learned” is the theme of the last week. However, I find that most years I’m wracking my brain to figure out just what I’ve learned. Often times, I seem to learn the same lessons year over . Maybe that’s because I always read my old Lesson Learned posts before I write a new one. Maybe I’m just prone to forgetting….Yeah, it’s probably that’s.
So this year I thought I would jot down some of my thoughts around the event each in the hopes that I might find some new wisdom at the end of all this.
Every year, I feel like I start to think about blogging differently around day 3 of the event. I find myself thinking about writing more often, brainstorming ideas in my downtime, and reading other blogs way more than I typically would the rest of the year. Nothing has changed here, I’m still doing all of these this year.
By the time this post goes live, I will have increased my post count for the year by 11 and exceed my post count for last year. That’s not bad, considering before Blaugust I hit publish on a grand total of 2 posts! It’s been fun getting back in to a routine this week. It’s a nice feeling to be creating something again rather than just consuming.
I’m definitely starting to feel that tug to write every day. Slowly but surely building that habit. Even if it is just for this month.
I ran out of scheduled posts halfway through the week. Kind of feel like I’ve been treading water ever since. 31 posts in 31 days is an aspiration for sure but, given that I’m still in the running, I might as well go for it if life permits. I’m taking this weekend to build up another set of posts to get back to that comfy buffer.
There are more blogs this year that are out of my typical reading scope. I’ve made a Blaugust feed separate from my Gaming feed to make sure I don’t skip out on these. Since I spend most of my time hanging around the gaming blog corner of the internet, it’s nice to see tons of personal blogs out there covering a wide variety of topics. Through some of these, I’ve been introduced to the concept of the IndieWeb which I’m finding really interesting the more I dig in to it.
As I suspected, getting back to writing has gotten me back to gaming.
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 ofHello 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.
Many Welps 