Tavern Keeper is a game I’ve been excited about for a while and, in fact, have raved about on this very site before. It’s had a long old development, taking around 10 years on the path to release—and will continue to amble into Early Access.
But it’s a cosy sort of amble, the kind a hobbit might take on the cobbled path to their humble hole, because let me tell you: I think this game is going to be very good. The demo, which you can play as part of Steam Next Fest, already promises a really endearing management sim.
You hire staff, sell drinks, and get to enjoy some Discworld-esque story events, delivered to you by the game’s charming narrator—all in a bid to fix up whatever tavern you’re saddled with into a destination for adventurers and paupers alike.
There’s plenty for sim buffs to get excited about, here: Temperature, noise levels, custom meals, staff with different stats and quirks, the ability to make your own drinks menu, fully customisable rooms and placeable furniture, and so on. But that’s not what I’m excited about, per se.
As you might be able to tell by the header image, Tavern Keeper has a massively customisable “decor” system. Your furnishings are split into two types—functional furniture, which your patrons and staff can interact with. Things like bar taps, storage palettes, and so on. The other type is decor, accessed through an entirely separate menu.
Boy howdy, are these tools powerful. You can fully scale, rotate, and clip decor to your heart’s content—and even freely move it around in 3D space. These items will affix themselves to where you place them, but from there you can have them float, kitbash them into each other, or just make a lovecraftian mess of polygons. It’s your game, I’m not your dad.
These bits of decor still cost money, but only 1-15 gold—which is far cheaper than even the basic starting functional items. There’s a lot of them, too; plants, rocks, bits of lumber, logs, vines, trellises, little hanging bushes of lavender, signs, particle effects, letters—and there are even colourable featureless shape objects, which I used to render our site’s glorious logo.
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And now that the demo has an endless mode, I reckon you could spend literal, actual hours just gussying up the trial tavern it gives you—I already sank about 40 minutes into just getting the sign right.
While the full game will see you moving location to location, this won’t necessarily be time “wasted”, either. You can easily select every item in a prop, then save it as a template—which you can place back down in other maps. These templates can also be shared with others, meaning there’ll eventually be a community with functionally infinite bits of furniture to plonk in your inns.
Tavern Keeper already has enough going for it without this customisability, but the fact it’s there has my little base-building heart so, so terribly excited. You can download the demo on Steam right now and give it a whirl yourself.
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