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

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 of craft revealed themselves to me. 

In Tavern Keeper, you're given run-down inns to manage as you progress through a small handful of key locations. Think Two Point Hospital, but you're running a bar full of unruly patrons rather than a medical nightmare. To progress, you'll need to accrue stars by fulfilling various objectives—hiring staff, designating and decorating rooms, and making sure your guests are happy with their ales and sundry.

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 the cinematic trailer Greenheart 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.

I was shown a hiring list as Klug made his first step towards building up his tavern—and there's a lot of character injected into these funny little guys already. Your staff come with various traits and aptitude in different skills, as well as complicated histories: Consider Bron, who was let go from his past two taverns for «making patrons disappear» and «booby-trapping the tavern»,