Ale & Tale Tavern Review

Congratulations! Your fourth great-grandfather has passed, and because everyone else is pretty much dead, and you're an orphan, and there really isn't anyone else to give it to... you get his inheritance and buy the tavern of your dreams: Ale & Tale. A rundown, destroyed, and abandoned place that, really... well... it's more of a scam than anything else.

This is how Scienart Games and publisher GrabTheGames start off your experience as you begin your journey to manage your very own tavern. Ale & Tale is entirely rundown; it's broken, and a lot of places are locked, so you'll need to open up, begin selling food and drink, and earn experience to get things.

But before we get into the gameplay loop, I'd like to touch on something that stood out to me rather largely: the Steam description. This seemingly AI-written piece of content felt like a misrepresentation of everything that Ale & Tale Tavern is, selling you on another experience that doesn't quite capture the charm of this game. Instead, the grandiose title sold to you via the Steam description feels nigh deceptive, with some things feeling a bit over-sold or fitting the criteria of gameplay by a strict technicality.

The Steam description will not be affecting my score at the end of it all — I am rating Ale & Tale Tavern based on the gameplay, how much fun I had, and whether you should try it, too. The marketing has no effect on the actual experience of the game itself, but I'll say right away: GrabTheGames heavily oversells its title, and it is not a great representation of what you get.

So, pretend you know nothing about Ale & Tale Tavern and allow me to guide you through the narrative and gameplay, instead.

Having played 14 hours with my wife, I've completed everything there is to get in the game, and though we did bloat the experience for quite a while, your overall expected playtime should be somewhere above eight hours. It's not a small title, and in this modern era of indie gaming, where titles can be as long as an hour long, the length was a welcome change of pace.

You'll spend that time gathering materials, completing quests, and managing your tavern (in orderof how much you'll be doing everything). At the start, everything is locked out, and the game is much simpler, giving you the opportunity to familiarise yourself with tavern management. You start off with Barley Porridge and Ale, and the tutorialisation felt adequate, with equal measures of hand-holding and letting you learn things by your own merit. Scienart Games trusts you to be able to figure things out... and when you don't, trusts you to laugh it off for the sake of chaotic humour; this perfectly explains the gameplay loop for Ale & Tale Tavern.

If you come into the game expecting a serious management simulator, you'll be disappointed. The writing refuses to grow into anything more than hilarious dialogue (and a surprisingly lovable — and dumb — protagonist), which though might seem like a complaint, is actually a breath of fresh air. You'll speak to a scarecrow, a cow, a mermaid, Navi the fairy (not literally, but trust me). Each quest gives you the capability to learn a bit more about the world and your character, and most importantly, will often reward you with a new gameplay mechanic.

Though I loved the way the writing worked and the capability to unlock new things (like fishing or alchemy), the quests boiled down to tutorial fetch quests, asking you to gather items to bring back to the quest giver in order to create something. The more I delved into the later parts of the game, the more obvious the gameplay loop became: you gather materials, open your tavern, level up, get a new main quest, work on the main quest, gather materials, and repeat. The quests, despite their hilarious dialogue and quirky protagonist and characters, become a bit of a drag to complete, as you'll be forced to run from one end of the map to the other.

In our hunt for the final achievement, we served the last customer a Barley Porridge... five seconds before they left.

Instead, however, the gameplay loop felt like it excelled when it did what you would want to play Ale & Tale Tavern for to begin with — gathering materials and managing a tavern. As you progress and collect more recipes and gameplay mechanics, the overall loop becomes longer, for better and worse.

This is where Ale & Tale Tavern shows off its best and worst parts and where you'll immediately learn that it is a significantly superior co-op experience. As you unlock more things, the capability to open the tavern becomes longer and longer, instead forcing you to spend a lot of your time restocking from the very scarce materials overall. In co-op, you get the opportunity to delegate tasks amongst your crew, where someone might head off to hunt whilst the other does the painstaking job of finding the ever-elusive Emerald Mushrooms, but alone, this becomes a lengthy, grindy process that takes away the management section that felt like such a highlight of the game.

The game judges you based on three different statistics whenever you open your tavern: the cleanliness, the speed of your service, and the variety of the meals you provide. This system works wonders to encourage you to get out of your comfort zone and add more recipes than you might have been comfortable at first, which saw me managing dozens of dishes I would have shied away from due to fear and anxiety. Instead of opting to go for the few dishes I may have been comfortable with, I added some of the more complex ones that I later found weren't just easier than I expected but fun dishes to cook overall.

Yep. Totally did that in Day 1. Totally not a glitch. Nope.

However, this comes as a double-edged sword: the more items that you are managing in order to keep your variety high, the more you'll find yourself farming for materials... for what feels like hours. As you add the dishes, you'll find yourself managing drinks, food, and recipes of different areas to ensure you have enough resources to get through the tavern opening. Having a variety of meals to use as many materials as possible meant that whenever I flipped the Open sign to Closed, I'd find myself staring at a mountain of items that I needed to regather so that my variety wouldn't take a hit.

This is where the balancing was a bit off: instead of feeling like a nice mix of gathering, management, and stories, it was massively lopsided towards gathering. As I unlocked the recipes, I tried to include them into my day-to-day routine, but it felt like Ale & Tale Tavern wanted me to have a wide variety of dishes at hand but also refused to provide the items necessary to follow the gameplay guidelines. Toad Legs, which you farm at the Swamp about a minute of idle walking away from your tavern, require two for each dish that you make, but each Toad has a chance to drop one or two, and there are only a handful of Toads in the Swamp at any given time.

Not only was there a scarcity of Toads, but the Swamp area was quite large, meaning that I spent several minutes jumping around to find one Toad to hopefully get enough legs to cook the Fried Toad Legs that I wanted to leave available. Yet, this is only one of the many recipes you'll get the feeling from: Emerald Mushrooms are scarce, you'll need to go to the Lake to get fish, you need to head out to fight enemies to hunt Boars for meat... the list of tasks was towering, and in order to play the game the "right" way, I wanted to have as much variety on my menu as possible, but that meant that I spent hours gathering and minutes opening my tavern and managing it. Which is a shame, because I reiterate: it is one of the best parts of the game overall.

The progression definitely feels like it's missing — there are things that Ale & Tale Tavern does that make levelling up and acquiring things ungratifying. As you gain experience and level up, the tavern unlocks areas without your interaction (and limits your two-floor tavern to entirely take place on the first floor... which was a huge bummer!), and there isn't anything to upgrade. Since the main purpose is creating food and drink for your customers, it feels less like a "tavern" and management and more like a limited bar with little to no decoration to be had.

You unlock the farming section, but there aren't enough plots to plant all of the things you'll need to open up, and you'll get no way to upgrade it. You unlock the capability to house chickens and pigs, but there is no way to upgrade it, and they all spend time in the same pen. You unlock the whole tavern, but it eternally teases you with the capability to have a second floor. Everything has the capability to unlock, but there aren't any ways to upgrade or customise your experience — you'll play the same game every other Jane, Joe, and Person Doe, taking away from your agency to enjoy the game as "yours".

Ale & Tale Tavern struggles a lot with project creep, as Scienart Games tackles so many different game mechanics but doesn't build on them. Many of the systems felt out of place, as there are so many things that you can do... but they don't have enough depth to justify their implementation overall. I wish that there would have been more focus on the aspects that made the experience so great, letting go instead of things like simplistic and straightforward combat that culminates in an out-of-place (though enjoyable enough) final boss fight. It feels like there are two Ale & Tale Taverns — the alchemy, combat, and adventure ones with bizarre dialogue and gameplay, and the resource gathering and management, and they both could have worked great... but not at the shallow level that they were implemented in.

Yes, I talk negatively about Ale & Tale Tavern, but the saving grace for it all is that it feels like Scienart Games has a down-to-earth view of their game's pricing. Costing just £12.79, it feels like a breath of fresh air in a space where pricing continues to skyrocket while gameplay elements get shorter and shorter.

It helps that a lot of the elements are great standalone, even if a bit shallow at times. Ale & Tale Tavern stands as a unique experience, as I loved that feeling of progression and working towards something, and the plus side of there being so many things to gather is that it feels like you are always doing something worthy of your time. You're hunting, you're looking for mushrooms, you're finding obscene amounts of apples, you're raiding an Orc camp... oftentimes, all at once.

And when you get to open the tavern, serve the customers, and see it all come to fruition as you get thousands of gold to add more tables and kitchen appliances, it's where the game truly shines. You'll serve as many or as few customers as you want, but there are few games that mimic the exhilaration and fear of seeing five customers sit down at a table all at once, each ordering two items, and then serving it to them. You close down shop, you clean up, wash the dishes, and prepare an action plan for the next time you'll open up, and it made the gameplay loop ever more gratifying, which was the sole reason why I complained about so much: Ale & Tale Tavern is such a marvellous experience brought down by several negatives, but when it works? It's a no-brainer.

Just make sure you bring a friend.