#management simulator

This game is certainly an interesting one. It almost seamlessly combines the grim feeling of being in a Lovecraftian cult, the strategy of a management simulator, the deductive reasoning of a detective thriller, and the expectation of failure and repetition of a roguelike.

The initial premise seems pretty simple. You have to pick one advisor from each of five different noble houses, each tasked with upholding a different virtue. You do this at the beginning of each season, and at the end of each season, you have to choose one of your advisors to sacrifice to Chernobog.

^(My little village, with all my advisors picked out for the season.)^

Now, you don’t want to sacrifice people arbitrarily, as, whenever you sacrifice someone, the virtue that they most exemplified begins to slip, as the people lose faith in Chernobog and in you. So how do you choose your sacrifices? Well, that’s where the detective elements come in.

Each character in the game has a virtue and a vice, each of which are hidden from the player at the start. There are a few ways to reveal what they are. First, if a noble house likes you enough, they’ll let you perform an inquiry, learning more about one of their members. Second, you can infer from little stubs the game gives you about each character, such as “As a child, he was a competent doodler,” or “She once challenged Lord Cadwell to an eating contest... and won!”. These will at least tell you the nature of the virtue/vice the character has. Third, you can let them perform a function for you on your council. If they are particularly detrimental to a particular virtue, then they likely have a major vice of that category. For example, if, in the course of their duties, your councilor causes the virtue of Obedience to slip severely, it may imply that their vice is a major one concerning Obedience.

^(Obey this, heretic!)^

So you have to sacrifice each person with a major vice (”sinners”), and make sure to not let each virtue drop too much while also making sure not to piss off any of the noble houses too much. There are a couple of complications to this mission, however. First off, when you sacrifice your first sinner, Chernobog sends you a dream demanding a greater encouragement of a specific virtue, and the life of a specific sinner. This can cause problems if you happen to get advisors who tank that virtue. In addition, whenever you sacrifice someone, the noble house they came from becomes annoyed with you. If you pick the same house sequentially, they get really quite irate, which can lead to a loss. This can be especially troublesome if you discover multiple sinners in the same house, as your instinct will be to sacrifice them sequentially, but that’s a bad idea.

^(Does protagonist is unrepentant?)^

So that’s the mechanics. Do i have any actual problems with the game? Well, sure. Basically, because of the random elements of the game -- each time you boot up a new game, it randomizes which characters have which virtues/vices -- it is difficult to form a decent strategy on one’s own. You feel as though the game is against you somewhat as you essentially are forced to guess which characters are worth keeping and which are worth sacrificing. This may actually be apt for a story about a Lovecraftian cult, but it doesn’t make for non-frustrating gameplay. However, the script flips after you figure out the right strats (or if you do as I did, and look them up). Once you figure out how to achieve the perfect run, the game becomes engaging, but not altogether challenging, and the replayability drops precipitously.

The aesthetics I really dig. The game has a grim, nautically grimy art style, with lots of dark colors contrasted against sickly light ones. As for the music, sometimes it’s jangly, sometimes it’s gloomy, and sometimes it’s foreboding and dark, but it always conveys a sense of wrongness, of an edge that you are very close to at all times. It fits, honestly. The one thing I really liked about the character designs was the the sheer eeriness of them. They all have this sort of doughiness to them, although some of them appear lean and malnourished as well. But the most striking feature of the characters is their complete lack of eyes. It makes them especially creepy.

I wish I could say more, but the game is quite short, so there’s not much more to say. Would I recommend it? If you’ve ever wanted to be a cult leader, or if you think the idea of being a cult leader is neat, then yes. Like I said, there’s not much replayability to it if you get the perfect run, but there are apparently five other endings to the game, each one depending on certain parameters that have to be met before the final season. Also, there’s apparently some DLC coming out soon, so I might have to pick it back up for that.

So, I have a bit of a soft spot for management games. I mean, it’s not like I go out and seek them like I might with an RTS or an RPG or a TBS or an ABCDEFG or an IRS, but I’ve never played a management simulator that I didn’t like. In many cases, a management sim is just the resource management aspects of a strategy game boiled down to their essential components, and sometimes Bioware sticks their head into the room and throws NPC opinion meters into the mix, or else something similar. Basically, management sims are strategy games boiled down, and I can get down with that.

So, Tavernier then. I’ve always kinda wanted to be a barkeep, and I might have pursued that goal if it weren’t for the terminal case of social awkwardness and anxiety I have to deal with on a regular basis. As it stands, this game gets somewhat close to my goal, although the actual management aspects of this management game have been significantly boiled down even more than usual.

The main thing to do in the game is make money, as might be expected. You do this by setting up a menu that your customers will appreciate, selecting ambient music for them, and putting up decorations for them. There are several different types of customers, each of which like different things. Rogues, for example, like dairy foods, while guards prefer meat, and folks prefer fruit. Each type also has a certain style of music they enjoy and certain decorations they like. The objective then, is to maximize your income by optimizing your tavern for a specific clientele (and now I sound like some kind of corporate managerial wankpot). That sounds involved enough, but it really isn’t. Just make sure your gold at the end of each week is greater than your expenses for that week and you’ll be peachy keen, and even if you don’t, all that’ll happen is a guard will show up and wag his finger at you.

Throwing a wrench into your operations, however, are a couple of factors. First, you have to decide on whether you want to be a “Professional” alcohol enabler, or a “Cool” baahrkaeep. Being more professional earns you more discounts on taxes and food, and being more cool gets you more customers. It’s not so much a binary moral choice system as much as it is a binary personality choice system. The second thing is that each week, an event will happen, and usually, you’ll have to make a choice about it. Sometimes, they’re good! But other times, not so much.

The game also has a story; a story about a mystery in the village, which you get to solve! Eventually. SPOILER WARNING, I GUESS. Each month, the mayor takes a miscreant from the village, and incidentally, from your tavern. When you investigate, you’re given access to a secret meeting, and eventually you find out that the mayor is being impersonated by a djinn who is fueled by human sacrifice. So you have to get together your friends and customers and oust the villain!

Now, I actually really like the story, but not because it’s a great story. Instead, I like it because it neatly utilizes all of the game elements. You need to ingratiate yourself with one of the several factions in the game so you get access to the meeting and later on to gather together an army, you need to get on one end or the other of the personality scale to prove you’re not too indecisive to do what needs to be done, and you need to gather enough gold and/or mana to supply your army and win the day. It’s all very ludonarratively synchronous, (now I sound like a smarmy video games journalist) because the plot is noticeably advanced by your playing the game well.

However, I do have a couple of problems with the game. First, the art style, while not uninspired, does get a bit grating after a while. Like, it’s as if someone leaned on the “Stock Fantasy”, and “Thick Black Lines” settings on Photoshop. Or maybe it’s because once you optimize your tavern you see the same customers over and over and over again and it gets tedious. I guess more character models wouldn’t have been remiss.

(This is the game, basically.)

Second, discovering the mystery and completing the story is really easy. I did it on my first go, starting with an unoptimized tavern and a shit menu, and by the end I had only optimized out of necessity and I still had a shit menu.

Last, the game is criminally short. You can bang out a run in an afternoon, easy. Sure, there’s an infinite mode afterwards, where you can just serve customers forever, but that kind of thing gets boring fast, especially when optimization is the name of the game. For scale, I took more time to read Lilith Grimm’s seminal work, “The Dildo in the Basement”, than I took to complete a run of this game. So I did three runs, and it was just as easy each time.

I can’t dock the game points for this next bit, because, sadly, humor is subjective. See, the game occasionally makes a funny to the effect of, “Wow, this is a video game we’re playing, innit?” For example, one event has an adventurer skip your dialogue and steal your goods while you stand motionless and helpless. Then, to drive the point home, the adventurer ruminates on how awesome it is to be the protagonist of a video game. Another hilarious joke comes when you meet the leader of the celestial beings (I know that sounds really impressive, but it isn’t). She goes by Ms. Sue, and introduces herself as Mary. I’ll let you figure out the joke. Like I said, I can’t dock points from the game because humor is subjective, but I found it tiresome at best.

I want to like Tavernier, but I found it kinda insubstantial, and the art and humor grated a little. I’m not going to play it again, but I suppose I can give it a tentative recommendation, on the condition that you’ve got an afternoon to kill and a hatred of djinni.