Thick Table Tavern
Went back and finished this one too. Hmm. It didn’t feel like there was as much story as I would have liked, but looking at Mike’s review I think I just got really unlucky: I only saw a single patron event (the fortunteller) so there were just the daily bits of banter with your boss and coworker, which felt like light variations on the same thing, pretty much. I didn’t even realize there was supposed to be a second coworker, a chef? I did get one event with more rushes than usual where someone came in and cooked tons of food but that was the only time I ever saw that character, though he had been vaguely mentioned once before, so I thought he was just some random crazy relative of the boss or something.
I also think I probably hit a bug at the end: I didn’t track and add up what I was making but I’m sure I was well over 300, and I thought we were counting up my money to make sure, but when I clicked to continue it blipped to some other guy buying the tavern with no transition text or description.
And the drink-mixing minigame was fun at first but there’s not actually that much there: just read the recipe, click the things, go. I don’t do alcohol at all, ever (I think it all tastes awful and I’ve always found it to make people excruciatingly boring, even just at having-a-drink-or-two-with-dinner levels) so I didn’t have any reference for what the drinks or the ingredients were, but even so I didn’t have any trouble. Even on hard, the timer is pretty generous: I rarely needed more than half the time. Except for the single-ingredient drinks: then it flies by. But that was on a second partial playthrough so I remembered what most of them were anyway.
It’s very pretty, but on closer look not quite as polished as it seems. The longest recipes overflow the box and you can pretty much see enough of the last line to know what it says but I generally scrolled down anyway to be sure. The name of the drink isn’t anywhere on the actual drink mixing screen, I think? The different glass shapes and color changes when you add an ingredient are fun, but the color changes, at least, seem to be random: I made the same drink three times in one batch once and they were all different. I guess it serves to let you know that you added something, but it doesn’t tell you if you got it right or wrong. The ingredients on the recipe aren’t in the order that they are on the shelf, but the order you add them doesn’t actually matter: if you want to shake or stir the “drink” before you put any ingredients in, go ahead. Likewise, it asks you to restock the bar but it doesn’t seem to affect the game if you don’t. I’m not sure if the other little tasks change anything either. Maybe they affect how many customers you get?
Altogether, it’s pretty, the story is fun, and if you can get past the overly-enthusiastic writing and the feeling that English is probably not the author’s first language, the dialogue is actually really well done. (I didn’t want to derail Mike’s thread any further, but I’ve also helped edit IF by speakers of other languages and that’s always fun, so if anyone’s in that boat feel free to ask.) The minigame got to feel like a grind, but the game wasn’t so long that it overstayed its welcome too badly for me. Well worth a try.