Ale & Tale Tavern is what you get when you mix restaurant management simulators with open-world fantasy RPG elements, which can honestly be a bit all over the place at times. I gave it a shot for a few hours and here are my initial thoughts on it.
NOTE: I received a review copy of the game and these are my first impressions.
Working From Scratch
In Ale & Tale Tavern, you get to build up the eponymous establishment from, well, not exactly the ground up, but it’s completely empty outside of a few piles of trash. Upon cleaning the whole place up (or at least the accessible parts), you finally get to start managing the tavern!
It’s a really slow burn, as the tutorial railroads you through your first few customers, and it takes a lot of grunt work to get anything done. I’d imagine this is infinitely faster with a group, but I’m judging this game by how well it plays solo.
Without any help, it takes a lot of time to progress, especially with how slow resource gathering gets over time. You can get away with cheesing it and just selling a single product, but it’s ironically more boring that way, as I’ve been doing that ever since I unlocked beer.
Behind the Counter
Playing this game reminds me a lot of those other management sims that suddenly grew in popularity a few years back, like Gas Station Simulator, Supermarket Simulator, and TCG Card Shop Simulator. For your first few in-game days, you’re essentially a one-person crew that does everything.
Cooking, cleaning, serving, and many other errands, all done by the player. Customers will continue to flood in nonstop as long as your tavern’s open, and they leave quite a mess as they go. It’s as frantic as it can get, as you get pretty much no time to rest if you want to be efficient.
I actually do enjoy this Diner Dash-like gameplay loop that gets more complex as you unlock and actually use new recipes. However, I do have qualms about how you can cook these new food/drink items.
A Wide Open World, But Why?
Ale & Tale Tavern markets itself as an open-world game, which honestly feels out of place in a management game. I guess it makes more sense in a co-op setting, because then you can delegate menial tasks and have certain people going out to gather specific resources. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem balanced at all for solo play.
Eventually, after your first few tutorial tasks, you’re going to be introduced to the quest board and new mechanics that require some roaming. It’s at this point I realized that the game feels like it has an identity crisis, because it has a lot of shallow features that make it seem like it’s trying really hard to be an RPG.
Combat? In a Tavern Simulator?
You might not be surprised to learn that this game has a combat system. Well, it’s not exactly tied to rowdy or drunk customers, and it’s… not good in its current state.
After a quick farming tutorial and some more leveling, you’re told that there’s something corrupting the forest creatures, and combat becomes a much more prominent feature. Now, I don’t expect the game to have some intricate combat system like Dark Messiah (I’d love the option to kick the orcs here though), but it’s way too basic that it just feels completely tacked on.
Y’know those bandit beater games on Roblox where you can just kite enemies with basic movement? That’s essentially how it works here for all the enemies I’ve encountered so far. Slap ’em once or twice, step back or to the side, then repeat.
It doesn’t matter what you’re fighting either. Bears, wolves, boars, zombies, etc., they’re all easily kite-able to the point where I’m left wondering, why do I even have to do this? I don’t wanna spend my time kiting boars just so I can sell a handful of steaks, nor do I want to run around and do the same to “cleanse” the forest.
Tedious Questing
The quest board itself feels like a massive trap too. If it’s not forcing you to find and kill enemies on the map, which isn’t even worth the amount of gold rewarded to you, it’s making you deliver food to NPCs that spawn in random places.
It doesn’t sound bad on paper, but these deliveries have you literally running all across the map for a meager tip. Eventually, I just figured it wasn’t worth the effort and decided to spend the rest of my time selling beer for EXP and a small profit.
Fun Yet Tedious
I’ll be the first to admit that, despite my issues with the game, I did enjoy the actual tavern gameplay enough to still be playing it as we speak. It’s exactly what I signed up for, and it does it pretty well all things considered. It’s complex and engaging enough to hook you in, but not so much that it becomes a headache.
Unfortunately, in between the cooking/brewing gameplay is a lot of tedious chores and exploring that, quite frankly, is a bit of a dull affair. You wanna make some boiled corn (literally the second food item you learn)? Time to start slapping soil with a hoe and waiting for it to grow, buddy. Done farming? Best find some boars that randomly spawn around the map so you can get some steaks made.
And that’s just the beginning. If you want to work with a diverse menu, you’re going to need to keep adding more exploring to your already long list of other errands and hunting. All the while, you can’t truly leave your tavern open. Yes, there are helpers you can eventually buy to serve customers and clean up after them, but it’s still up to you to wash the dishes and actually cook.
There’s no true delegation system like in other management/simulator games, so even if you do play co-op, someone is bound to be perpetually stuck doing most of the work in the tavern itself if you wanna keep progressing.
Now I do think it’s cool that the devs recently introduced procedurally-generated dungeons where you can get new equipment and ingredients, but I’m a long way away from that even if I try to rush through it. Maybe this whole Dungeon Meshi-style new system is actually very engaging compared to what I’m experiencing in the relatively early-game stages, but who knows?
Overall, I still do recommend checking it out if you have a group to play with, because a lot of the issues with it are going to be much more manageable with people taking up some of the tavern responsibilities. Just… temper your expectations a lot if you’re solo, because it’s absolutely going to be a slog.