A delightfully-detailed, Discworld-inspired inn manager with absurd furniture customisation stashed in the larder: Tavern Keeper enters early access this year

GamesLife SimA delightfully-detailed, Discworld-inspired inn manager with absurd furniture customisation stashed in the larder: Tavern Keeper enters early access this yearWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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Game Dev Tycoon was a bit of a phenomenon back in the day. Released in 2012, Greenheart Games' first major title quickly achieved viral success due, in part, to being a neat little management game about the industry itself—making it a popular choice for YouTubers and streamers.

Over a decade later, the studio’s ready to put its next game out into the wild: Tavern Keeper, a game about, well, keeping taverns.

I had the chance to sit down with Patrick Klug, director and manager of Greenheart Games, and had an early peek into the game itself. At a glance, Tavern Keeper looks like a cosy little inn management game—and it is—but the more time I spent looking at it, the more little elements ofcraftrevealed themselves to me.

Your first fix’er upper is in a little muddy swamp called Riverbottom, and I’m immediately charmed when a lovingly-animated ogre paddles down the river to sell you casks of ale. The game’s clearly flooded with little touches like this—and while I think thecinematic trailerGreenheart Games showed back in Gamescom 2023 is cute, it doesn’t quite sell how nice everything looks in practice. Everything’s got this OSRS style low-poly look to it that’s like liquid nostalgia.

It’s all very Discworld in nature, which is something Klug emphasises as a key inspiration: “I think it’s much more towards Discworld than Lord of the Rings. Our stories are not really about heroes and adventurers, it’s more like this anachronistic, quite modern kind of thing with a bit of heart and humour.”

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As you continue to refit and rehome your inn, you’ll also be presented with “stories”, little choose-your-own adventure vignettes that can do everything from providing brief mechanical bonuses to giving you unique staff, such as a skeleton who got tired of guarding a dungeon and wants to pursue his dreams.

“There isn’t really a story where you ‘fail’,” Klug explains: “If you make stories too mechanical, then you get players not actually caring about the story—they care about the outcome, so they click through and get to what they want, like, ‘I want plus two food’.” If you’ve ever played Wildermyth (which I highly recommend), Tavern Keeper’s stories appear to work very similarly.

The more Klug plays, the more I get a sense for the level of detail at play—later in the game, players can toy with not only drinks, but food recipes too. Cut to a bespoke, fully-animated and rendered section of the menu where he hucks some swamp rats into a bowl with water, each ingredient having its own varying trait Potionomics-style. Neat, I think so far. This all looks like it’s had a lot of care gone into it.

Klug then selects a cabinet, goes into “detail mode”, and nonchalantly reveals to me that it comprises 114 pieces he can grab, scale and rotate at will. Excuse me?

(Image credit: Greenheart Games)

Furniture is placed rapidly in a tavern in Tavern Keeper.

Players can save templates they create in design mode (or grab a share code to allow other players to use them) and bring them into their next tavern. There’s even a debug-style grid map with every single asset loaded in that’s available to players, giving them carte blanche to tinker with infinite money.

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