Where would adventurers be without the humble innkeepers who make sure they’re rested and stocked with positions before heading into a dungeon? In a dragon’s belly, that’s where. In the cozy strategy game Dungeon Inn, you play as a group of those innkeepers giving much-needed comfort to the adventurers who come your way. I got to play Dungeon Inn ahead of its Nov. 14 Early Access launch and found its chill take on the management sim subgenre just as soothing for me as my inn was for the guests who came my way.
At the start of Dungeon Inn, entrepreneurs Sara, Bami, and Butter — the last two of which are cats — stumble upon a golden opportunity. The trio cuts a deal with a dragon that allows them to open an inn at the entrance to its lair, catering to the heroes coming to plunder its riches. In exchange, Sara and her companions agree to fork over a portion of their earnings each month to add to the dragon’s hoard.
On top of the dragon looming nearby, the money-making scheme has one more hitch. Your clientele comes from two neighboring guilds that absolutely hate each other, and if they find out you’re catering to both, you’ll be closed for business.
Dungeon Inn throws perhaps a little too much at you in the beginning, but getting the hang out its gameplay isn’t hard. At the bottom of your screen sits the inn, and the two towns where your guests come from are on the top left and right. Travelers follow a path straight down from their homes to your inn, and your job is to manage their movement to keep them from running into each other on your doorstep while getting as much coin from them as possible. That means placing distractions to stop or slow them, giving out energy drinks to speed them up, and advertising the inn to entice them to stay, with more tools and abilities being added as time goes on.
At first, it seems like a little too much to manage, but Dungeon Inn’s turn-based structure actually makes it easy. Every turn, adventurers move down the path a set amount. Four turns make up a day, at the end of which everyone will vacate the inn to make room for new guests. Since it’s turn-based, you can take all the time you need to act on each turn, and your limited actions mean you won’t often be left scratching your head at what to do next.
Dungeon Inn is a pretty forgiving game. Even if two rival adventurers meet, you can sway the battle to make sure the survivors are on your side, and it takes a while for enough suspicion to build that it becomes a problem. Even if you only make the bare minimum income each month, you’ll easily have enough for the dragon’s tribute, though making enough to keep a profit for yourself is significantly harder. Later on, additional objectives like making sure certain guests stay for a night or going a month without a fight add to the difficulty, but it always feels manageable.
Plenty of other games have tackled the mercantile side of adventuring, like 2018’s Moonlighter and 2022’s Potionomics. What makes Dungeon Inn stand out is how much it leans into coziness over challenge. Hitting your required goals from week to week is more or less a cinch, and the limited choices in each turn make it a nearly stress-free experience.
All of that makes it the perfect game if you’re looking for a game that will help you relax while still engaging your brain a bit. That’s certainly how I was feeling as I played the week of the presidential election, for reasons that should be extremely obvious. Dungeon Inn’s strategy elements demand enough focus that I wasn’t able to ruminate on the increasing likelihood of losing my health care, but they’re not so taxing that they added to my already excessive levels of stress.
Calling a game’s mechanics simplistic sometimes has a negative connotation, but it doesn’t need to. There’s room for Dungeon Inn to add a bit more challenge or more punishing decisions to make, but I hope that if it does, it doesn’t lose its cozy core. Strategy games often lean toward the more hardcore end of the spectrum, and having one that lets me test my management skills without the fear that one wrong move will spell my doom is a nice change of pace.
