Tavern Keeper is a charming audiobook narrated with a prodigious actor. The furniture system is so freeform that I know I'm going to lose hours playing it.

I wrote about Tavern Keeper after Greenheart Games showed it to me via video call in early this year. The developer has spent 10 years developing it. After sitting down and playing a bit, and having a chat with studio director and manager Patrick Klug at Gamescom I've gone to be utterly smitten.

Tavern Keeper is a management-style game that takes inspiration from games like Two-Point Hospital. You manage, build and (very important) decorate a number of inns within a fantasy world with Discworld-meets-D&D vibes. I can't comment on its mechanical trappings, as I've only played the demo for a short period of time. However, they appear to be extensive and offer plenty of options to customize your bar.

Tavern Keeper's design is what really stands out. This game is a wonderful place to spend your time. It has a lot of cute little UI features to keep you entertained and a great sense of humor, forming a cozy atmosphere.

While teaching me about nested prompts in the tutorial, Tavern Keeper allowed me to open around twenty dialogue boxes on my computer screen. At that point, Klug had to come over to tell me that while they were going to add an achievement for players of my level of bit based brain rot, (those were my words, but he was much nicer about it), the demo I was using would loop them endlessly.

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. The vignettes are narrated in full by a man who sounds like a warm embrace. As Klug explains:

"Most management games are FTL-style, with one sentence or paragraph, three options, and a very mechanical approach. For us, the tavern needed to have a character.... We were able to hire my favorite audiobook narrator. Steven Pacey has narrated many audiobooks.

This guy's website shows that he has worked on everything from Dr. Who to the Gruffalo to entries in Warhammer 40k Horus Heresy. In other words, this guy is the real deal and lends a Hitchhiker Guide-level legitimacy to the whole operation.

The game's furnishing system was what I was most excited to try, and I ended up being trapped for the majority of my time with it. It is as customizable as I had hoped. Tavern Keeper allows you to create and save custom furnishings. You can rotate, scale, and clip together hundreds of pieces to create anything. The scale is also almost infinite. You could, for example, put a book up on a shelf or rotate it. You can also scale it and use the cover design of the book as a carpet. Just clip it half into your floor.

I spent four minutes playing with the game before I physically tore myself away from it so I could see the rest of it. Klug then showed me the community creations made by the game's testers. These included a coffee maker, a Dungeons & Dragons Table, and a painting that was entirely created with hundreds of carefully scaled items.

Klug says: "Originally, we debated whether or not to limit the scales, and I am so glad we didn’t." Then, he adds with open amazement, “Someone made pixel-art.” We don't use a grid system, so it is amazing that they placed hundreds of pixels into the game.

The game I played, while I cannot speak to the finer management meat of Tavern Keeper's loops, was simply lovely. You can try out the demo on Steam. Tavern Keeper is aiming to release early access on November 5.