this game is not necessarily your typical horror game fare. rather than opt for overreaching horror narratives, or investing in tonal oppression, this game opts for a more existential ideal of horror.

which it proceeds to use to bludgeon your psyche with nightmarish questions about personhood, identity, and the notion of an afterlife. I find myself recommending this game all the time. not only is it a wild ride, but philosophically, it's one of the most useful games in history, in my opinion.

I can't in good conscience recommend this game, and that's for quite a few reasons. I'm going to list them out in no particular order.

Tools decay way too fast, resulting in very absurd costs for doing things. This is especially noticeable in single-player. The solution to this is to make tools decay much slower in single-player, and probably even in multiplayer. I am not averse to tools having durability, but as things stand, it feels very excessive.

The VA is extremely awkward and incompetent in places, and this is amplified by the dialogue writing being fairly incompetent as well. An English-fluent proofreader would have been helpful here, but with line deliveries and manhandling of pronunciation of words ("Prejudice" or should I say "Projustice" comes to mind), it overall gives this game an extremely unpolished feeling. There is not an easy solution to this. Much of the dialogue should be rewritten and much of the VA should be re-performed, with better direction. A fluent English-speaker should be involved in this process if English is going to be a main language of the game.

There's no day/night system beyond the way it seems to affect the wilderness. While a 24hr Tavern isn't an awful idea by itself, this game wants to ALSO have you go on "adventures" which usually means wandering aimlessly around the map for a long time until you stumble into your objective by chance. My preferred solution to this would either be to abandon having a day/night system, or to have the day/night system affect the actual gameplay of the tavern itself.

There is no convenient map, and the game world is excessively large and lacks recognizable landmarks, for the most part. This results in it being extremely difficult and confusing to navigate, especially when you are looking for something that the in-game Locator system doesn't provide a pip for (The Herbalist's Hut being the example in my case). There are a few solutions to this. My personally preferred one being to give each player a handheld map that fills in as you find locations, and has your position marked on it. This would enable better tracking of quest objectives and make things easier to find in the gigantic empty world.

The game insists on holding your hand through some of the early stages, but almost immediately gives up on this, despite some of the mechanics being a bit cryptic. If you thought you could put out a fire with a bucket of water, think again, idiot, you have to use the watering can. The Solution to this is simple: Just have a more robust tutorial, or have a tips system that offers helpful feedback when new situations come up.

The Progress meter for repairing certain furniture is obnoxious and hard to track. This is a petty gripe, but in my personal opinion, having it constantly ticking back down just makes it feel like it takes much more effort than it should to repair things. My suggestion here would be to have the progress undo only after a second or two of inaction. If I am actively fixing the stove, it shouldn't be constantly fighting me.

It can be very difficult to tell whether or not the tavern is dirty at a glance. There is a status screen which shows how your tavern is doing, and this vague percentage indicates how much needs to be cleaned, however it took me over an in-game week to realize the hay piles on the floor were something I could interact with via the broom, and at a certain point, the cleanliness popups in the top left corner simply stopped appearing, rendering cleaning a much more daunting chore. This needs to be further playtested and made more robust, and it would be helpful to have cleanable objects highlit while holding the broom as a quality of life change.

Combat in this game is EXTREMELY lackluster, despite its prominent positioning by the game. You are expected to do quite a lot of combat in this game about running a tavern. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but unfortunately the combat can be boiled down to "hit a few times and backpedal out of range of a counterattack" in most cases, and in other cases, like the wasps, this strategy has to be adjusted to circlestrafing. This is not engaging combat, and when compounded with the breakable weapons, it becomes a complete chore. Fighting is often the central mechanic of games with fighting in it, and this game does a great job of showing us why by having utterly irredeemable combat in its present state. This is, by far, the worst aspect of the game's mechanics, especially as a solo player. My preferred solution is to add quite a few more basic mechanics to combat to make it more engaging, for example, a block ability would go a long way. More accessible healing would also be very welcome.

The economy is absurd. Almost everything is dramatically overpriced in singleplayer, and because of the way selling things works, once you acquire Chickens the entire economy falls apart. Chickens cost 350 gold, and also they SELL for 350 gold. This means that once you have two and are producing new chickens, you can sell every single chicken above your second one for pure profit. This renders the entire rest of the tavern obsolete. Why would I bother serving customers when I can make much more money selling chickens to the "suspicious" merchant. Selling prices for furniture and livestock should simply be much lower, except this would hamstring the economy of death in this game.

Dying is very expensive. I cannot quite tell if the cost is a percentage of your current money, but from what I understand, all players in a server also share gold, which makes this system fairly catastrophic. I think the death system needs a severe rework. I would prefer a system that is less punishing on death. Having to find my way back across the incomprehensible map is already a big chore. Losing a chunk of my income in the process just adds insult to injury.

Walking is a bore in this game, and instead of having a sprint ability, you can hold "Shift" to walk more slowly. This is very unintuitive and makes navigating the world feel like a chore alongside the issues with the map. Further, small objects on the ground are very capable of fully blocking you from walking over them. Apparently, it's too hard to walk over a mushroom for our player characters. Jumping is only moderately useful for getting over objects, seemingly having only been tested on the paddock fence, and even that can be a bit of a crapshoot. I am uncertain why jumping exists in this game, as there doesn't appear to be any utility to it BESIDES getting into the paddock.

The basic Dishwasher cannot be picked up. I have not noticed any other furniture behaving this way, but it was deeply frustrating to realize that my Dishwasher is forever trapped in the location it was placed. This is a strange oversight on the dev's part.

Aside from these complaints, I actually quite enjoy the main gameplay loop in the tavern. When I am well-prepared and open the tavern, it's quite fun to serve customers and make dishes. I like decorating the tavern and I like the character customization on my avatar. I'd like to see more flexibility there, and more character models, but these are mostly minor issues that didn't feel as important to highlight as the above bullets, which genuinely threaten my experience with the game. With a fair bit more polish, I think this could be a very venerable entry in the classic genre of Job Simulator style games, but as it currently stands, it's just too unfocused and incompetent in places for me to give it a recommendation.

I have seen that the devs respond to feedback on steam reviews, so I tried to maintain a helpful level of feedback, and will amend this review if things are updated and this review needs to be changed. I will document any adjustments below.