Ale & Tavern Review - Cook, Serve, Deficient
When cooking, there’s more to just popping the ingredients together and hoping for the best. There’s the recipe, a level of finesse and prior understanding that helps, I like to think that there’s a certain level of care for the person you’re making for that helps. Ale & Tale Tavern is a new tavern sim with a fantasy setting. Sounds great, right?
Every developer seems to have a different take on the genre. That means that each time I play one of these, it’s a very different experience. This time around there’s the option for co-op or single player, at least in theory. Realistically, the game really needs the co-op focus, because there’s no scaling of people or anything similar. Actions within the tavern are washing up, picking up plates, cleaning, cooking food, brewing drinks, serving and ushering out rowdy patrons. Does that seem like it’s realistically able to be done with a single player? It is, only if you have less than say, 2-3 tables. There’s also no day/night cycle for service, so if you hit ‘Open’ on the door, it’s going to be like that until you forcibly close it again.
Your time in the tavern starts much before you open it. Content is unlocked via quests with NPCs, and work in the tavern feels very much like filler to get to the next quest and unlock more. The NPCs voice work is rough, to the extreme of grating. I’m really glad devs are using real voice work, big thumbs up, but it’s clear that some of the deliveries are by amateurs. I’m not going to be too harsh here, but there were times I really wanted to mash through some of the quest lines just to stop hearing them. The person who voices the main character though is quite good, so there’s that.
The writing is equally mixed. The second NPC you meet is an enchanted scarecrow, by the back door of your inn. Every NPC is more or less distilled into a single theme, and they stick to that theme like glue. The scarecrow unlocked the pasture for me to grow crops, but not before I had to hear his promulgation of the wonders of ‘magic weed’ in almost every line of his dialogue. Because nothing is funnier than hearing the same joke repeated 40 different ways. Every conversation was like being on Reddit. The NPCs needed you to do everything for them, often requiring running back and forth from the tavern multiple times. Looking at you, herbalist.
It’s a lack of care for the intricacies that really got to me. Cooking requires ingredients, but most of them can’t be bought. That means you need to close up shop and hunt around the forest for ages to find the enemy you want to fight, kill it, and harvest it. If you want to cook a lot of something, expect to do 20-30 minutes of grinding a single mob type. It’s such a tonal whiplash from the normal gameplay. I was a fan of the music though. The soundtrack is competent, and I would say it’s one of the best parts of the game. The jukebox was purchased early (much to my chagrin) so we could play some music. It was the small point of pure joy for us.
I wanted the tavern experience to be cooler. Cooking is ok, serving is very ho-hum, and cleaning just sucks. There’s a top floor that never gets used, there’s a few pieces of automation that come into play late into the game but by then I was pretty checked out, even with three players. There are ratings for your tavern, hidden away in menus but it didn’t seem to affect much. Admittedly, we kept the tavern pretty clean and served people fairly quickly, but it felt like a mechanic for mechanic’s sake rather than adding anything substantial to the game.
I played through the entire game with two friends, and by the midpoint we were only playing to complete the game. That’s only four hours in. The game seems to lack focus on what it wants you to do. I want to run a tavern; I’m not here to fix the world or kill the great evil. I’m here to cook and serve; don’t make me buy furniture for some mage because he’s too much of an arsehole to buy it himself!
Cooking requires finesse and understanding, and I didn’t feel either of those from Ale & Tale Tavern. It feels like all of the mechanics were thrown into a pot without understanding the recipe, and so the final result comes out as a bit of a mess, and to me it was quite unfulfilling. Still, the Steam reviews seem to be pretty decent, and my opinion is that of just one guy. If you give it a try, I guarantee you it won’t leave you feeling indifferent.
Ale & Tale Tavern was reviewed on PC using a code kindly supplied by PR. It can be purchased now on Steam.
