[Disclaimer: I received a review key for Ale & Tale Tavern through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators. The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience. Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]
Ale & Tale Tavern
Systems: Windows, Linux
Release Date: September 5, 2024
Publisher: Grab the Games, Upgrade Point
Developer: Scienart Games
Time Spent: 2 Hours 24 Minutes
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Ale & Tale Tavern is essentially a tavern management sim where you can make your work as complicated and as stressful as you want. Its core mechanic plays similar to a lot of mobile job management games where you are initially limited in what you can create for your patrons and you have to make that item and serve it to them within a certain amount of time or your customers become angry and you presumably lose gold or experience points or you have fewer clients; I'm not actually sure on this but I'm just assuming because I'm that good of a tavernkeeper. As you gain experience, you level up and gain access to additional recipes which expand your menu as well as expand the list of things you need to do in order to make more complicated and thereby higher costing and higher exp items; we'll get more into this later. All to further your goal of developing and expanding your existing tavern, although I'm not honestly sure of the end goal as I haven't progressed that far in the game yet.
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We're jumping a bit ahead here, but the beauty about Ale & Tale Tavern is that you are allowed to set your work hours and your menu. You are not constantly inundated with people wanting a pint of barely ale or a bowl of barley porridge. Randomly generated characters will only show up after you flip the sign in front of your tavern to "Open." If you have a recipe book with eight recipes for your patrons to choose from, you can select what your menu is, if you want, you can only decide to serve porridge. This is important because you are required to purchase your mugs, bowls, and a lot of your starting ingredients from a merchant just outside the tavern, so if you're our of barley to make porridge or ale, you can select on the fly to only serve boiled corn instead, and that is all that people will ask for. I feel like this option greatly eliminates the amount of pressure on the player to constantly maintain an inventory of ingredients and takes away the fear that the game will all of a sudden inundate the player with people making complicated requests that might have a high overhead cost and time commitment.
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On that note, Ale & Tale Tavern can be played as a single-player or co-op up to four total players, which is what this game really feels how it was meant to be played. You could one person taking orders (you click on a patron), one person prepping the food/drinks and washing dirty dishes, one person serving and bussing, and one person procuring ingredients either from the merchant or from the garden outback; or refilling the bucket with water from the well which is a required ingredient for nearly everything in the game. As a single-player game, it can get a little hectic trying to perform all of the tasks by yourself. Keeping track of your inventory, people's order,s and the water level in the washing tub. At the same time though, I feel that you would also need to be in constant communication with the other players to make sure that anything purchased is what is actually needed, like another sack of barley and two more mugs and not a jukebox; I also don't know if the money earned at the tavern is usable by other players or just the hosting player.
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When you need to restock your inventory or just take a break, you're able to close your tavern regardless of the time of day or night. Sometimes you just need to catch your breath, or because maybe you ran out of money and you need a quick spot of gold so you take a delivery order which can be all well and good, except you don't have a map or a handy Skyrim-esque compass. Luckily someone put up the occasional road sign so you can find your way back to the tavern, but make sure to bring a torch if you're going out after dusk because things get dark when the sun goes down. Who knew? The biggest downside to making a delivery is that you end up losing any mugs or bowls you take out there whereas in the tavern, you can just pick up after people leave, wash, and repeat. I think there might be some kind of hidden durability mechanic here because I could have sworn that I had one or two fewer mugs/bowls and one point during my third playthrough. I also read on the Steam discussion pages about people losing their mugs/bowls, likely because they despawn if you let them sit too long, so maybe I just forgot to pick some up after a customer left?
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While Ale & Tale Tavern is mostly a fun game with a reachable point of zen, there are some elements of the game that I'm not a particular fan of. Already mentioned is the lack of maps or compasses to get you around the the world without feeling lost and the feeling that the single-player game could reach a point where your immediate tasks feel more like a real job and less like an escape. The voice acting, unless it's an AI-generated voice, for the scarecrow is both annoying to listen to and a bit cringy with it being hung up on you growing "magic weed" and your character being offended that this animated anti-crow device would suggest something so illegal. Maybe it'll be explained later? Either way, I personally find the scarecrow annoying. Combat is also something that feels needlessly difficult, especially in a single-player game. Your starting weapon, the axe, only does minimal damage while the zombies (or orcs, boars, or wild dogs) do 15-20 points of damage and with two attacking simultaneously, your health can drop rather quickly. On top of that, respawning costs you 10% of what gold you're carrying, and from what I've read, there are no health/stat boosts and no armor, so you just have to learn how not to die. Yeah, I know. Git gud.
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I'm only 2.5 hours on the Steam Deck without any real issues* and my tavern reached level 7, which is anywhere between a third and a fifth of the way through the game, depending on what is seen as the end game. There is a fun game here, possibly a fun co-op multiplayer game that I'll likely never get to play unless I want to play with random people and hope to the spirit of Alexi Laiho that they're actually there to do a job and not dick around like the hired help that they're supposed to be. If you're at all interested in seeing how great I can run a cozy little tavern in the middle of a fantasy setting with the cleanest well this side of the River Isen, I have a playlist with three videos up (likely more coming later) on the YTubes that you're welcome to peruse.
And maybe have a pint or three before you leave, yeah? Just don't abscond with the mugs, they're not cheap.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
The Grass Will Be Greener One Day I Expect*P.S. The only problem I experienced was that the L/R shoulder buttons that operated the scroll wheel when selecting items in your scroll wheel inventory (as opposed to your backpack) were flipped, so the L button scrolled to the right, and the R button scrolled to the left. I know I could have changed this in the button customization settings, but it seemed like just a little too much trouble to switch the button mappings around.
