We were recently fortunate to receive a few copies of Ale & Tale Tavern for review and streaming purposes. Having previously played with friends, I was more than happy to jump in and host our party so we could try out the new dungeon update.
Welcome to Ale & Tale
Your new tavern is ready and waiting to be cleaned, ready for customers. It’s got all the standard markings of a great simulation game, but there are some basics you need before you get started.
A tutorial walks you through the basics of cooking, brewing, and serving customers before introducing more complex tasks. It’s all tracked like a quest on the screen and backed by a voiced character, making it easy to understand and accessible. You’re then left to your own devices as the game opens up, and you get to decide how to expand and explore at your own pace.
There are later unlocks for the garden, chickens, bees, fishing and even an inn with four rooms to tend and upgrade. These mechanics don’t have a lot to them outside of unlocking and then grinding for materials, but they do the job. The inn was a little more involved since you have to find the upgrades in the wild, but it gives players a good reason to engage with the quests and dungeons.
Open For Business
The basic Ale & Tale gameplay loop revolves around opening your tavern for customers. You gather resources, combine them into food and drinks, and then serve them, curating the menu to suit your supply. The controls are relatively simple, with regular prompts reminding you which buttons to click to interact.
Customers will request items from the menu, but you can change their order if you run out of supplies. They have a reasonable capacity to wait, but it’s usually better to have a few stoves on the go to pull meals from.
I found this part to be incredibly stressful in multiplayer. The number of people playing increases the number of customers to such a level that if even one person wanders off in multiplayer, the tavern will be overrun. This was one of my least favourite parts of Ale & Tale Tavern, at least until we unlocked some automated support.
Automation Is A Hoot
While you need to collect or trigger most interactions yourself, there are “Owl Helpers” which you unlock who can serve customers or clean dishes automatically. They have adorable animations and cute sound effects as they trundle around the tavern floor doing their jobs.
From what I understand, they were added in a later update and completely changed the game for me. Serving was still stressful, but at least I only had to worry about the cooking and inn side of things.
A Taste For Adventure
A great many of the resources you need to make better, more profitable dishes can be found in the wild. You need to hunt down bears and spiders through forests and swamps, with the occasional orc camp or quest-giver to uncover.
The world itself isn’t huge, but it’s big enough to get lost in if you’re not paying attention to markers. Some kind of compass marker wouldn’t go amiss, or a mini-map, but they’re not really needed when you can track the tavern and your team’s markers. We also seemed to have huge wait times between enemy spawns, which made completing quests for specific enemies or drops was a lot harder to grind.
The Dungeons
A recent update added procedural dungeons to the randomised quests. They start to appear later in the game (after level 21) and require you to jump through a portal to clear out the treasures and enemies inside. We actually mistook the end-game dungeon for the quest dungeons for a time, but they did start to appear eventually.
My companions enjoyed this aspect, but I got lost and quickly lost my patience and interest in them. The bonus yields provide higher-quality items, which do make them worth doing, but the combat system is one of the weaker aspects of Ale & Tale Tavern.
It feels clunky, yet very in keeping with most simulation games. Even with the addition of potions, spell scrolls and the ability to reforge weapons, battles were often won through brute strength and relentlessness rather than skill. And all but one of our party was running back from the tavern respawn and missed the death throws of the final boss, which isn’t ideal.
Not Another Simulator Game
I’m surely not the only person who has been burned a few too many times by asset flips and copycats, but Ale & Tale manages to stay reasonably fresh in a stagnating genre. Its whimsical world and banter-filled dialogue provide a degree of humour and engagement despite the cookie-cutter formula and lack of actual development.
I enjoyed the interactions with NPCs and the absurdity of a lot of the situations I found myself in. Unfortunately, you can still boil everything down to being basic fetch or kill quests, which leads to a lot of running back and forth between quest markers.
Eventually, the things I liked about Ale & Tale became the things which let me down the most. The quirky dialogue often ran on for several minutes while I waited impatiently to return to the tavern to collect the next items. Cooking up new ingredients and trying out the new machines was fun, but having a stacked menu only made the game harder on me. Equally, adding a fourth player increased the difficulty so much that we thought the tavern was glitched when we were only three.
If you’re looking for multiplayer friend-slop, then Ale & Tale Tavern will happily house you and your crew for a good few hours. It’s not as stressful as the likes of Overcooked, but you will need a team that is present and able to work together if you are to succeed. It’s also worth noting the engagement of the developers, long after the initial game’s release, and the number of updates/changes they have already implemented.
Platforms: PC
Publishers: GrabTheGames, UpgradePoint
Developers: Scienart Games
Played On: PC
Key Provided By: Ale & Tale Tavern Team
Check Out Our Full Playthrough On YouTube Now:
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