The Management Sim genre has evolved since the original Tycoon games, adding new mechanics each generation. Inn Tycoon draws inspiration from these early titles, aiming to honour their legacy. But does it succeed in translating this homage to appeal in today’s market?
Humble Beginnings
Your tycooning dream begins in an overgrown plot with a small room holding a bar. The tutorial will take you through the basics as you hire staff, expand, and slowly level up your inn to unlock new items to place in each room.
The system works on a tile-based mechanic where you designate a four-tile block as a type of room before placing the corresponding items for staff and customers to interact with. Although it doesn’t lend itself to creativity all that much, staff can walk around the items, so you can really stuff them in.
This tile-based system is the key to mastering Inn Tycoon as you organise your space to maximise your efficiency for better productivity and profit. Each workstation has an effect radius, determining where an item will end up. Creating the perfect pipeline from kitchen to server to customer was satisfying but challenging as the map expanded, forcing me to try new layouts.
Room For Growth
The actual play map is around 20×20 room tiles, giving you lots of space to play with. Each new room tile needs to connect to another tile on one side to be placed on the map. You can also combine some rooms and use tavern tiles as corridors.
There are seven types of room tiles: tavern, kitchen, bedroom, bath, cellar, game room, and garden. Most of the items are hidden to begin with, but can be unlocked using “Level Points” gained from levelling up. These points are also used to level up your staff, so managing how you spend these is important.
Although the kitchen and tavern had a good number of items, with more in the decorations tab, I felt like the number of utilities in the other rooms was a little lacking. Equally, a lot of the items interact with NPCs, so they have animations and generate income, as opposed to artificially inflating the library with static set building assets. So, I’m not really complaining.
There are some fun mechanics that increase boons and daily bonuses. Random quests pop for you to undertake, which can reduce costs or bolster service charges. You can also spend reputation to host events, which can give positive and negative effects depending on how cheap they are. There are also cellar items that work for a limited time before vanishing and boost different stations.
Your Faithful Crew
The tavern, kitchen, garden, bedroom, and bathroom tiles require staff to be assigned to them. As does each bar and bard stage you install. Hiring staff has been simplified to a single click, with the cost going up exponentially. Your staff have no emotions or needs to contend with, but you can spend level points to level up their specific skills, speed, and salary expectations to the betterment of your inn.
Your staff will set about their specific tasks automatically, meaning you are reliant on your tile placements to ensure efficiency. There are no specific staff management rules, so your staff can essentially walk around and do any job they want. This leads to staff criss-crossing between tile rooms to get to available tasks if you don’t bunch things like the kitchen and tavern rooms together.
The More The Merrier
The number of customers arriving each day seemed to go up incrementally. They arrive and choose a desired activity automatically, with their happiness bar going up or down depending on their experience. It looked like they would pay for each interaction, and if they had a good time, they would leave a tip. The ca-ching noise made was really satisfying in the beginning, but I did get overstimulated by it later on when making bank.
Players also unlock another faithful companion or two to help in their mission. You get a choice between a few dog and cat models to join your team. They run around collecting tips for you, which was a really cute addition. And yes, you can pet that dawg. Or caress, as it’s called for some reason.
The Nitty Gritty
Inn Tycoon boasts simple yet stylised assets that stop things chugging as your customers pile in by the hundred. They’re not bad models when you zoom in, and are super animated, giving a little bit of extra charm. This is backed up with a simple atmospheric tavern jingle that loops endlessly until it fades into the background of your dissociation rather nicely. There are seasons and different weather effects that are simple yet effective.
There are some options to increase the UI scale and control some lighting and sound levels, but that’s about it for accessibility. I did appreciate the controller support, but ultimately it became redundant as I left the inn running on my second monitor while I pottered about doing other tasks on my pc. My only real complaint was that I couldn’t change the angle of the camera, only rotate and zoom in, but that’s not game breaking.
The Way Of The Tycoon
Building up your tiles does take some time, but Inn Tycoon doesn’t require the micro-management of things like Two Point. After a couple of in-game weeks, I started leaving things on top speed and checking in at the end of the day when I had to click next and choose any event cards I wanted. By about six hours in, I had unlocked all the unlocks and was focused solely on upgrading and redesigning my inn for achievements. Which is where I found my only real issue with the game.
Inn Tycoon introduces engaging concepts and an enjoyable gameplay loop, but as I progressed, I realised the experience lacked depth beyond its initial appeal. Without a clear endgame or extended goals like a career mode, I found myself searching for lasting motivation to continue playing. This absence affects its longevity compared to other management games that sustain interest with ongoing challenges.
A Capital Idea
Evil Goose Games created something fun and engaging that hails back to the iconic retro management sims that spawned the genre. The Inn Tycoon gameplay loop isn’t stacked with too many mechanics or bogged down by micro-management. It hits a nice sweet spot somewhere between casual and idle gaming, while still offering the accomplishment of seeing your management skills in action. For under a tenna, Inn Tycoon is a solid release, and I’m looking forward to seeing what else Evil Goose Games releases in the future.
PLATFORMS: PC
DEVELOPER: Evil Goose Games
PUBLISHER: GameDev.ist, Gamersky Games
PLAYED ON: Steam
About the Author
