Even In Early Access, Tavern Keeper Already Feels Like The Fantasy...

It's been in development for over a decade, and all that hard work really shows.

It's a normal day in my tavern. A talking skeleton has lurched in and is standing at the bar inquiring about a job. A pale white octopus is swimming through the swamp to deliver my order of potatoes and rat meat. I'm using arcane magic to peer into the future to gain some extremely important knowledge: will anyone visiting my pub tonight have a hankering to play darts?

I've long been looking for a great fantasy game where instead of a brave adventurer I could just be a humble tavern keeper, and it's finally arrived—and appropriately enough, it's called Tavern Keeper. Despite it being in early access, and despite having only played for about 8 hours, I've already fallen head over heels for it.

Tavern Keeper's tutorial is almost shockingly brief: after plopping you into a rundown pub in a gloomy swamp, you run through the basics of how to buy kegs of booze and serve them to customers, hire workers and assign them jobs, and order supplies that can be cooked into meals.

But that tutorial is just the start of a learning process that hasn't ended even after eight hours of play. There's a to-do list to keep both your customers and staff satisfied, from managing room temperature and decorations to improving the quality of the food and drink you serve to making sure the lantern you hung over the toilet in the bathroom doesn't cause a fire.

Plus, this is a fantasy realm full of orcs, halflings, elves, wizards, rogues, and plenty of magic. As you manage your pub, you frequently encounter storybook events, many of which give you choices to make. I had to choose if I wanted to hire that skeleton to work in my bar (I did, naturally), and later he had another quandary when he wondered if having a proper face might endear him more to customers. (I said no. I like his skull just the way it is.)

There are even RPG-like skill checks for certain encounters, like when I was chasing down an arsonist who had been setting fires in my tavern and had to use my dexterity to grab him.

Once I'd completed the swamp campaign, I took over a second tavern in a Shire-like realm which was packed with new challenges and events, including a huge harvest festival and a vote-based competition between different guilds. (The Thieves Guild, unsurprisingly, stole their way to victory.) I'm now on a third campaign, set in a barren desert of the orcs, where an orc scientist is giving me access to the latest in fan

Source: PC Gamer