Love Tavern Review

After being hit by a truck in the real world, you’re resurrected in another world — it’s a familiar enough concept by now. In Love Tavern you’re then given the option of becoming the manager of the titular saloon for 1,000 years, or being erased from existence. After a brief tutorial, you’re on your way.

The concept is simple; build the types of rooms your tavern requires to pull in customers and make as much money as possible. At the end of each day, you’ll get an earnings summary and if you’re making money you get a blessing from the goddess, so there’s even more reason to earn a lot, above the usual “capitalism” aspect.

Customers start to come in to eat some food and drink some beer, and although this is the first part of the business it’s also the one which will take up most of your time. Nobody can eat if there is no food, so you have to keep cooking meals — but you can’t cook without ingredients. So the second thing you’ll be doing is sending people out to forage for them, each time taking a couple of minutes (until you unlock Expeditions for a constant stream of materials).

Once your kitchen is up and running, you can start building other rooms, such as an onsen and a bath. Oh, and a massage parlour, because this is an 18+ game featuring monster girls, did I forget to mention that bit?

To staff the Love Tavern you will need to hire some ladies of various humanoid races, from Weresheep to Harpies to Liches, as well as humans. Humans are boring, though, so if you want your ladies to earn tips then you’ll want the monsters. While you can assign anyone with a stat in “massage” to those rooms, you can’t peep on the humans for some sexy scenes (so long as you have the free 18+ DLC installed). Each monster also has a backstory that you can run through, each part of which sees you playing a match-3 game for some reason. Honestly, it just seems like they wanted to give you something to do and had the match-3 elements laying around, so added those in.

There is another mini-game that you will be playing constantly as a demon freezes your rooms so they’re unable to make money. So, you have to click on the room to begin a mini-game which involves hitting the spacebar when the meter reaches specific symbols. You have to hit six symbols before it has attacked you 14 times which sounds easy enough, but the symbols are randomly placed so you might get four in a row, or you might have to wait a lot. The demon can hit multiple rooms at once, and it will happen — as I already said — constantly.

That’s actually the main problem with Love Tavern, it feels like several elements just thrown together with little care or attention paid to why. The match-3, for instance, has two spaces for some kind of power-ups, but there is no actual way to obtain them. There’s no rhyme or reason why some things require you to click and others use the spacebar — sometimes you can click anywhere, other times you have to click in specific places even though very similar screens let you click anywhere!

While the voice acting for the monster girls is great (there is no other voice acting), the same unfortunately cannot be said for the sound effects and music. The sound effect choices are just stupid in some cases; when you have erotic artwork and voice acting that elevates it, putting some marsh-like squelching sound effects in just ruins what you’re going for.

To give you something to do when your tavern is up and running, there are VIP customers who need specific things doing to keep them happy. Luckily, the same types of things are also used to improve your relationship with certain characters like the store owner. Cook x number of dishes, upgrade rooms to level x, serve x dishes of food… It’s usually stuff that will help you out anyway, and you get rewards for completing the tasks so it’s not a waste of time.

Love Tavern lets you run a tavern, which should be pretty obvious from the title. Unfortunately, despite its efforts to be more than that, it doesn’t manage it at all. The interface seems fit for a touch screen, the mini-games are really basic, and it too quickly devolves into a game of timers. The adult scenes are varied and interesting, but noninteractive, so not really a gameplay element and more a cutscene. At least there are a lot of monster girls.