Epic Tavern

It is a very fun game but not finished. Last update was back in 2023 and as of posting this no further updates or messages from the developers. Game may be abandoned. Do not recommend buying at this time.

Abandoned, stay away, very much unfinished after 7 years (I bought this in 2018, because of the potential)

Reasons to avoid 5-year-old Early Access Game with No development for a year Unstable bug-ridden mess

5+ years of development and it's just been one janky unbalanced mess.

Would I recommend this game for 25 USD? No. The game's interesting, it's got some cool systems to it (when they function) and the concept, while played out a bit, definitely fits a D&* (go away WOTC) styled setting. It definitely has some passion put into it and it seems the dev (or the new dev?) is still hanging in there with it. But HOLY ♥♥♥♥ is this game riddled with bugs. It's stable enough and I've only experienced one crash so far, but I could write a manifesto on every bug I've encountered without even reaching what could be considered the endgame and a few of them have straight up stopped me FROM progressing and having to restart. Speaking of manifesto, while the writing is for the most part pretty enjoyable... this game suffers from lazy twitter writer syndrome. You'll find a lot of parts in this game where the writer clearly tried to think of a joke or a punchline and then gave up and decided "I'm going to insert my modern day political opinion into this fantasy game". I don't give a damn who you vote for or even if you give a damn about American politics in the first place but it's still inexcusable, lazy and basically put an expiration date on the game once the political division that sparked those jokes is figured out or gets pushed to the wayside and stops being the hot topic. Hell, even beyond that it just makes a bunch of the jokes not even land for people outside of the US. I mean for gods sake, even some of the steam achievements basically just encourage you to recruit diversity hires while passing up some adventurers you'd actually want/need. But even beyond some of the lazy writing, game ruining bugs, weird balancing where you're either completely rolling over the game or you're struggling bad, the insane pacing where you go from struggling to not giving a damn about money within a few hours of playtime and the pretty inconsistent update schedule... yeah, it's fun. It's not 25 dollars fun, but there's something here that could be polished. Honestly, it's clearly self-owned since the publisher on steam has the game's name in the title. Just drop the price to like 10-12 USD and it would be a lot easier to just say "yeah get it, enjoy it, and later on it'll get fixed" to friends. I'm not gonna get upset because I spent money on it and then the price went down, I'm gonna get upset when the sales stop trickling in and that leads to development being abandoned. That said, I am going to lay out a list of bugs. With the state the game's currently in I'm shocked it's not getting daily/weekly minor hotfix patches pushed just to try and make it functional. -After you play a bit too long on a save, you'll sporadically have combos in the tavern break and just not show any other orders or even time out until you press end combo. (the fix is a full game restart, and the game only saves at the start and end of the tavern segment) -Seemingly at random camping events will break and not allow you to select any options. (once again, either main menu and reload save if you're ballsy or full game restart and lose any quest progress you made before it occurred) -Sometimes when you exit to menu or desktop, your ongoing quests will just forget about any items you earned during them, or straight up mark themselves as failed even if you already succeeded in the main event. (there is no fix, it usually occurs when trying to fix other stuff. sucks to be you.) -when attempting to replace an item with a piece of gear someone else has equipped you are prompted that it will remove it from the adventurer that already has it equipped. Upon pressing accept, it just doesn't do anything. This makes moving gear around a pain since you have to either have spare gear to slap on the current item holder or enter the other full list of adventurers to remove it. -some quests just outright wont let you start them. Only one I've found that I absolutely can't fix is the 3rd quest in the FSU (or whatever the acronym is) questline where you have to go persuade a witch to stop cursing people. It just asks for a specific character to be a part of it, but no matter what you do it will only give you the cancel button where the "go" button should be. -various dialogues are broken and include formatting syntax or variable calls. -the kickstarter trophy popup can't be closed. (fix is exiting to desktop, which as has been stated will lead to other issues) -Loading and saving times SIGNIFICANTLY increase the longer you play a save. In some instances the game will stay on the saving screen indefinitely until the game is closed when finishing the adventuring segment (fix is closing the game) -Some windows, popups etc will become stuck on screen. You can still play if what you need to press isn't behind them, but if there is something you need to press behind it then proceed to lose that day's progress (if it's a character window such as when mousing over their portrait, the fix is to mouse over any other portrait on screen, if it's not the portrait then proceed to restart game) -Closing the game or exiting to menu after finishing a quest that unlocks a new upgrade/system (such as the infirmary or wine cellar) will show on your history that the quest hasn't been completed, that you no longer have the quest and that you cannot proceed to upgrade or implement said system. (Fix? new save.) -There is no windowed borderless option. It's 2023, this released in 2017, not having an industry standard feature deserves to be in this list. Attempting to force windowed borderless with a program such as Fullscreenizer will break popup windows. Alt Tabbing while in fullscreen seems to accelerate the game breaking and causing other various bugs. This means your only real option is true windowed, and you can't even fit the window to screen. So yeah, pretty bug riddled. No bugfix patches in recent history. No community-made bugfix mods. Playing this game will feel like trying to wrestle into behaving most of the time. Also it really sucks at explaining what half of it's systems are actually doing. What does "protection from all" mean? who knows, but you have it. Here's hoping you paid attention to the automatically minimized windows that show the math going on. Is your character paralyzed? We're still going to tell you that it has a 78% chance to succeed a role while in reality we will show you in the math window that it only had a 6% chance after you attempt it. Speaking of the math, the random number generator is definitely unintentionally weighted because you will fail 90% chances waaay more frequently than just 10% of the time. Though at this point that makes it feel more like D&* with whatever 25-cent-each dice your dm could afford to bring. tl;dr: buy it on sale or pray for a more realistic price change, expect some outright game breaking bugs 6 years into development, expect a bunch of modern political inserts just like you'd find at any public table in a card shop written by someone who had about 2 minutes to prepare an encounter and [strike]hope (but don't expect) that development will improve and make me change this review.[/strike] edit: after catching Richiebee doing a 2 hour stream of them attempting to bugfix while putting up with me, I think it's pretty safe to say that the game's trajectory will most likely improve. I can't imagine that he's going to abandon the project with as much effort as he's put into picking up development for it, especially not when he is the owner of the company which employed the original developers and this title does hold weight for the reputation of his own company... that said, he is one man and he has work outside of this game to do so it could be a while before a significant enough number of the bugs I've listed get fixed and I have to change this review. I can confirm that work is being put in and progress is being made, though.

Had potential in 2017 but now it is abandoned. I wish I could get my time and money back.

The gameplay is fun, but there's still too many bugs for me to recommend it. It's been in beta for 6 years. It still crashes, there's parts of the game where you can't get past because of bugs. Popups you can't close so you have to close and open the game again. I hope this gets fixed, because it really has potential, but as it is right now it has too many issues.

The game is unfortunately dead...had good legs on it but has been abandoned and it crashed my Steam client every time I try to quit the game.

Have no idea what's going on. No tutorial. Just a bunch of clicking. Seems like there's something there, but with no explanation of numbers, traits, etc. and just mindlessly clicking things that are available, this game is not ready for playing, not by a long shot. An in-depth tutorial is desperately needed (vs the few pop-ups that appear in the beginning that do nothing to explain the mechanics).

Not finished/polished enough, lacks substance