The Thick Table Tavern
This game has three basic parts: the framing story, the mixing-drinks minigame, and the main story and storylets. So, I’ll talk about all three!
I didn’t particularly care for the framing story. I found the ultimate (hinted-at) identity of the ‘Watcher’ and of the creator to be a bit cliché, but more importantly, it didn’t feel like anything was done with that premise. The Watcher just showed up and was mysterious. The final choice was a bit weird: normally, I’d be happy to replay a game to explore alternatives, but in this case the offer to replay was given to the protagonist, not the player. And as such, I strongly felt that the protagonist had no business replaying his own life and giving himself a potentially worse outcome and even a different backstory; that would have betrayed, in some way, his whole life. So I just said ‘no thanks’ and quit. And now I feel I can’t replay the game separately, either
The mixing-drinks minigame was also not particularly my style. There’s a list of things to click and you find and click on them, and then you get a new list. And…that’s it. I did discover that grenadine is a syrup, I guess. I feel like there are aspects of actually mixing drinks that could be interesting to explore in a minigame, but those would be things like mixing things in a particular way, in particular ratios, or making clever substitutions, all based on the patron you’re serving, or based on your knowledge of how drinks mix. But none of that was in the game; it was just ‘click this recipe’. You could set the difficulty level so that instead of just ‘click this recipe’ you could instead ‘click this recipe with added stress’, which did not sound like it would add anything to the experience, so I stuck with Easy mode. There was a time or two when the game didn’t recognize that I had clicked something, which on the harder modes would have made me angrier, so I didn’t get to experience that, I suppose.
But that brings us to the heart of the game; the ‘fiction’ part of the ‘interactive fiction’. And this I liked! Having the setting be ‘a place where interesting people stop by’ was great; it made what was essentially a one-room game feel like a normal full world. Sort of a B5/DS9 experience instead of a TNG game, if you will. The waitress character was fun (if somewhat objectified), and the owner character was also interesting, though I felt that characterization kind of abruptly flipped after his introduction, and I never did really figure out his backstory. And the parade of storylets of people coming through the bar were generally fun and well-written, though the obvious highlight was the older couple. I also liked the ritual of getting everything ready in the morning. Clicking on each of the bottles in turn when restocking the bar made me identify with the protagonist in a way I hadn’t expected: he was an excellent bartender, and always methodical in ensuring he had every tool he needed to do his job.
Did the author have something to say? : Not a ton; mostly simple NPC characterization with a touch of worldbuilding. The obvious place to have something novel to say would have been in the framing story, but I felt that was mostly a missed opportunity.
Did I have something to do? : Yes! Unfortunately, a lot of what I was given to do was the ‘click this list’ minigame, which wasn’t particularly engaging for me, but it was at least simple enough to get through without too much difficulty. The morning ritual was a lot more engaging for me, all told. Interestingly, however, these interactions made me not realize that my choices during the rest of the game were fairly limited. It wasn’t until I had to write this paragraph that I noticed, in fact! So that’s a pretty clever bit of game design; kudos!