Tavern Keeper is immediately charming, narrated by a prolific audiobook actor, and has a furniture system so freeform I already know I'm gonna lose hours to it

I wrote a little about Tavern Keeper when Greenheart Games, a developer that's spent 10 years making it, showed it off to me over a video call earlier this year. After sitting down, playing a little, and getting to chat with studio manager and director Patrick Klug at Gamescom, I've gone from curious to downright smitten with the thing.

Tavern Keeper is a management game in the stylings of send-ups like Two-Point Hospital, wherein you manage, build, and (very importantly) decorate a series of inns in a fantasy setting with Discworld-come-D&D vibes. I can't speak much to its mechanical trappings (as I've only spent a short time with the demo) though they seem extensive at first glance, with opportunities to min-max your bar to your heart's content.

What's really flying off the page, however, is Tavern Keeper's presentation. This game is a downright lovely place to spend time already—it's got a host of cute little UI elements to keep you charmed and a tremendous sense of humour, forming a whole that's cosier than a roaring hearth.

For example: while teaching me about nested tutorial prompts, Tavern Keeper allows me to open about twenty such dialogue boxes on my screen, at which point Klug has to come over and tell me that, while they're going to put an achievement here for players with my level of bit-based brain rot (those are my words, he was a lot nicer about it) the demo I was playing would loop them infinitely.

Tavern Keeper's best finishing touch is by far its storybook vignettes—interruptions to your moment-to-moment management duties that face you with a handful of choices. They are fully narrated by a man whose voice sounds like a warm hug, and as Klug explains, has made an entire career out of being like that:

«Management games usually have the FTL style, one sentence or one paragraph, three choices, all very mechanically driven. But for us, it's a tavern, so it needs to have that character … In the end, we got to thankfully hire my favourite audiobook