The Thick Table Tavern by manonamora
For all the care that has gone into it, The Thick Table Tavern doesn’t quite know what kind of game it wants to be. The best way to enjoy it is to just, well, enjoy it. Sit back, relax, go with the flow. Mix some drinks. Read the dialogues. Collect coins. Don’t worry about the prologue or the scene with the fortune teller, because the heavy themes they hinted at – free will, moral choice, nothingness – will in fact never come up. You’ll just collect your coins and join the adventurer’s guild, or whatever it is you wanted to do with your hard-earned money. Everyone will be happy.
In one sense, The Thick Table Tavern is a linear story about office dynamics, the office in question being a medieval/fantasy tavern. It’s all good-humoured and low stakes. The boss if gruff but affectionate; the barmaid likes to pull your leg but is fundamentally nice; and the cook is a bit weird but basically harmless. At times the story seems, for just a moment, to veer off into dark directions – child abuse, adultery, marital discord – but then it invariably doesn’t. Your interactions with the story are minimal to the point that I have no idea whether anything you do impacts what happens (though it might). In the end, everyone hugs you when you’ve amassed the necessary amount of money (which is surprisingly easy).
To break the monotony, the game serves up a cocktail mixing mini game. This too is very low stakes. You just need to click the ingredients that are shown in a list. In the beginning a little exploration is required, but after a while it’s just relaxing, perhaps even a bit monotonous in itself. If the game had been longer I might have tired of it, but it went on just long enough. (There are about five or six days if you mix the cocktails well, although the blurb suggests that things will play out over fourteen days. I’m glad that they didn’t.)
The interface is well-made. There do seem to be some serious bugs in the game logic itself: the number of coins I had collected seemed too high, and then the game didn’t actually register that I had collected 300 coins until I had over 600 in my inventory. There is also a day where the boss goes out to see his niece (I think?) run a race, but then the game goes on to present the content of the too-much-food-event for the second time, which made no narrative sense. As for the prose, it’s certainly serviceable, but I ended up reading through it quite quickly because it is on the wordy side. Another reviewer remarked that it might have been good to cut it by about 25%, and I agree with that.
I had a nice time with the game, but, as I indicated in the first sentence of this review, it didn’t seem to have a central point. The mixing mini game is too simple to command much attention. The story about my co-workers is more a sequence of scenes than a gripping narrative. The overall story arc of amassing enough money is without any sense of urgency or accomplishment. And the more serious elements, such as the strange Watcher, feel tacked on and inessential. Given the amount of work the author has clearly put in, The Thick Table Tavern seems a tad too forgettable.