I wrote a little about Tavern Keeper when Greenheart Games, a developer that's spent 10 years making it, showed it off to me over a video call earlier this year. After sitting down, playing a little, and getting to chat with studio manager and director Patrick Klug at Gamescom, I've gone from curious to downright smitten with the thing.
Tavern Keeper is a management game in the stylings of send-ups like Two-Point Hospital, wherein you manage, build, and (very importantly) decorate a series of inns in a fantasy setting with Discworld-come-D&D vibes. I can't speak much to its mechanical trappings (as I've only spent a short time with the demo) though they seem extensive at first glance, with opportunities to min-max your bar to your heart's content.
What's really flying off the page, however, is Tavern Keeper's presentation. This game is a downright lovely place to spend time already—it's got a host of cute little UI elements to keep you charmed and a tremendous sense of humour, forming a whole that's cosier than a roaring hearth.
For example: while teaching me about nested tutorial prompts, Tavern Keeper allows me to open about twenty such dialogue boxes on my screen, at which point Klug has to come over and tell me that, while they're going to put an achievement here for players with my level of bit-based brain rot (those are my words, he was a lot nicer about it) the demo I was playing would loop them infinitely.
Tavern Keeper's best finishing touch is by far its storybook vignettes—interruptions to your moment-to-moment management duties that face you with a handful of choices. They are fully narrated by a man whose voice sounds like a warm hug, and as Klug explains, has made an entire career out of being like that:
"Management games usually have the FTL style, one sentence or one paragraph, three choices, all very mechanically driven. But for us, it's a tavern, so it needs to have that character … In the end, we got to thankfully hire my favourite audiobook narrator. His name is Steven Pacey, has narrated a lot of audiobooks."
Looking at this guy's website, he's been on everything from Dr. Who books, to the Gruffalo, to entries in Warhammer 40k's Horus Heresy—in other words, he's the real deal, and lends an air of Hitchhiker's Guide-tier legitimacy to the entire operation that's the cherry on top of an already damn fine sundae.
What I was most eager to try (and subsequently trapped in for most of my hands-on) was the game's furnishing system, which is just as wildly customisable as I'd hoped. For those unaware—in Tavern Keeper, you can create (and save) custom furnishings that let you scale, rotate, and clip hundreds of pieces together to make, well, just about anything. Scaling is nigh-on infinite, too. For example, you could put a book on a shelf, or rotate it, scale it, and use its cover design as a carpet by clipping it halfway into your floor.
During my limited time with it, I managed to make a table with an axe slammed into it, as well as a charming little stone feature with a tiny bird on top—one I futzed around with for four minutes, before physically tearing myself away so I could look at the rest of the game. Afterwards, Klug showed me some community creations via the game's current testers, which included a coffee machine, a Dungeons & Dragons table, and a painting entirely designed with hundreds of carefully-scaled items.
"Originally, [we] were debating whether we should limit the scales or not, and I'm so glad we didn't," Klug says, before saying with open astonishment: "Someone made pixel art. We don't have a grid-based system, so they really precisely placed hundreds of things, like three hundred pixels into the game, which is amazing."
While I can't speak to the granular management meat to Tavern Keeper's gameplay loops—what I can say is that the game I played was just inherently lovely. If you'd like to try it out yourself, the demo is available on Steam. Tavern Keeper aims to release into early access November 5.
