Ale & Tale Tavern

good game....they would never know i add my love souce in their soups....

I played Ale & Tale Tavern together with a friend for around 16 hours across two sessions of roughly 8 hours each. Overall, I think it's a good game with a really nice foundation. The art style is charming, co-op worked perfectly for us, and especially during the first half we had a lot of fun cooking, farming, raising animals, exploring and gradually unlocking more space, recipes and equipment. However, towards the end of our first session and throughout most of the second, we started noticing quite a few things that made the game more repetitive and stressful than it probably needs to be. The biggest issue is that the game sometimes feels like it doesn't quite know what it wants to be. It's roughly 50% tavern management and 50% running around the world doing quests. That would be completely fine if the tavern side had more depth, but after a while there simply isn't much new happening there. You mostly repeat the same routine, with slightly different dishes, to earn money for quests and upgrades. The tavern itself also feels more like a restaurant than an actual tavern. The four guest rooms basically add changing bedsheets and delivering food, while customers have very little interaction and there isn't much meaningful customization or management. Resource management eventually becomes quite exhausting. With two players it was manageable, but I imagine solo being significantly more stressful. We eventually had 4+ owls serving customers, one player almost permanently cooking, while the other constantly collected meat, eggs, honey, fish, crops and especially WATER. Please give us a sink or some kind of proper water system. Water is needed for cooking, drinks, washing dishes, laundry, etc., yet you constantly have to run outside to the well. Even the "automatic" dishwasher only washes 10 items before you have to refill it. We eventually kept 10+ buckets of water in a chest and one of us had to refill them regularly. It works, but it really shouldn't be necessary. The owls are a great idea, but I'd love to see more types of helpers. An owl that changes bedsheets, one assigned to a stove that continuously cooks a selected recipe, or helpers for farming and animals would be great. If automation is already part of the game, expanding it would make the later stages much more enjoyable, especially for solo players. VIP guests are another good idea with some frustrating execution. A dedicated VIP area would be nice instead of having them scattered around the tavern. They should also only request items you are actually capable of producing. Asking for something not on the menu is completely fine, but asking for something that requires a machine you don't even own yet isn't particularly fun. We also occasionally completed their requests only for them to suddenly become drunk despite never ordering alcohol, forcing us to kick them out and lose the scratch card reward. One of our biggest disappointments was the equipment "upgrades". Things like the Double Stove or Pro Grill barely feel like upgrades at all. Most of the benefit seems to be durability and occasionally a tiny amount of saved space, while some upgraded equipment actually takes MORE space. For their price, they should cook faster, process multiple items at once or provide some other meaningful advantage. Storage and space become a problem as well. By the time you have several stoves, ovens, grills, presses, fermenters and other machines, you also need a ridiculous number of chests for all the ingredients. Ingredient shelves or larger specialized storage would help a lot. A basement expansion for storage and additional equipment would also be fantastic. Farming and animals are enjoyable, but somewhat limited. A larger or expandable field, more animal pens and some late-game automation would be welcome. The bee area feels unnecessarily large considering we never really needed more than three hives. Fishing could also use some quality-of-life improvements. Having somewhere closer to the tavern to fish would be nice, and I'd happily pay more for a premium fish trap that doesn't break after a few uses. Combat and weapons are probably one of the weaker parts of the game. The crossbow and musket aren't particularly satisfying against actual enemies, and weapon upgrades are extremely expensive compared to the relatively small damage increase. We had particularly bad luck upgrading and spent over 100k, which definitely didn't feel worth the result. The boss double scythe ended up being our favorite weapon. Alchemy was fine overall. A small recipe book showing combinations you've already tried would be a nice addition, but that's more of a bonus than a real complaint. Despite this long list of criticism, I don't think Ale & Tale Tavern is a bad game at all. We had fun, I don't regret buying it, and the basic concept has a lot of potential. Most of our complaints are less about the core game and more about quality-of-life, automation and the lack of depth in the later stages. With some additional tavern mechanics, meaningful equipment upgrades, better automation, improved storage and especially a better water system, I could easily see myself returning for another playthrough in the future. For co-op, I can definitely recommend it. In its current state, though, I personally think playing solo would become a bit too stressful once the tavern gets busy.

Hell yeah.

Yo this game is so worth the money OMG like i'm obsessed. To the developers, a round of applause for you!

this game is a master piece I FULLY recommend this game

Nice blend of cooking and monster fighting. What else could you ask for?