Key Preview Takeaways:
- The early game is a bit too hands-off since you have to hire employees to do most of what needs doing.
- I really, really wished I could’ve built out on floors above and below rather than just across.
- Once it picks up steam, Long Rest Tavern’s gameplay loop gets really enjoyable.
I'll be honest: if any of the D&D parties I've been involved in walked into my place of business, I'd call the militia immediately. That just isn't going to end well. But in the upcoming Dungeons & Dragons: Long Rest Tavern, I was able to serve drinks and offer a warm bed to some of the Forgotten Realms' more well-behaved adventuring bands. It ended up feeling like a pretty natural fit between world and mechanics. As a management game, it's a little bit on the basic side, but there is added depth to discover as your intrepid customers strike out to win fame and fortune, and maybe cut you in a little bit on the side.
Roll for Hospitality
Your innkeeper can come from any of the main D&D 5th Edition races and classes, though so far this is purely visual. Druids aren't better at growing hops, as far as I could tell. Regardless of their background, they have found themselves in possession of a run-down, abandoned, haunted tavern by the side of the road. I'd love to have seen the ad, because it definitely seems like kind of a scam at first. But in spite of everything, I took to befriending the resident spirit, cleaning up most of the mess, and getting everything looking nice and cozy.
This rendition of the Realms is very stylized, with a chill and charming storybook aesthetic. The various dwarves, elves, and tieflings that come through the door have big heads and tiny bodies, and are animated with exaggerated emotiveness. This, along with good use of color and contrast, makes it very easy to tell what's going on at any given time from a wyvern's-eye view. Your guests also need to be able to see their meals, though. So in addition to a bar and tables, you'll need to place light sources either on those tables or close by.
It takes at least three to run a tavern, so before I could open for business, I had to hire a bartender and a waiter. These are the tasks that your innkeeper avatar can't do themselves. Each available staff member has different stats to reflect how efficient they are at pouring pints, cooking, waiting tables, and cleaning up. They also come with one positive or negative trait, like taking longer to get tired or levelling up slower. Their daily wages, of course, tend to reflect their skill level. What a wondrous, fantastical world this is!
Opening Night
There is no bar seating in the Long Rest Tavern. Rather, parties will place their orders with the waiter, who then travels to the bar, waits for the bartender to fill the mugs, and then brings them to the table. At least it saves the heroes the trouble of crowding around the taps and trying to wave and yell out over loud conversations to get a refill. It did feel a little odd to me that I couldn't directly help out with this process, since it means a lot of standing around early on. You can talk to an employee to make them work faster for a limited period of time, and it's up to you whether you want to imagine that as a berating or a pep talk. But especially those first few nights it kind of felt like my main job was to stare creepily at my customers.
Once a party has finished their brews and left a proper mess in the process, it was my job to clean up the table to be ready for the next customers. You can eventually hire someone to do this as well, but I didn't have anything better to do, and I was feeling a bit awkward about not contributing anything to the business other than start-up capital I probably inherited from a rich uncle or something. Satisfied guests will leave nice tips and increase the Renown of your tavern as they spread the word, which eventually attracts more prestigious guests.
New opportunities come with new challenges, though. The low-level scrubs who make up your starting clientele are more than delighted to gulp cheap ale by the pint. Kids these days with a +1 Base Attack Bonus and no magic items are always going out to get absolutely trashed on Fantasy Michelob Ultra. But if some proper toughs with a few successful quests under their belt wander in, they're going to start asking for fancy IPAs or whatever possibly cursed liquor the bards in Waterdeep are promoting these days.
And so my little inn took on a side business as a brewery. The ingredients for the lower-level libations can simply be ordered from the local grocer. But more advanced recipes require a bit of danger. We'll come back to that, though, because the next step was getting some beds set up so weary and/or completely sloshed aspiring champions could sleep off their hangovers.
Growing Pains
While I appreciated the gradually increasing complexity of running my business, this is where I started to get a bit frustrated with the fact that Long Rest Tavern only features one buildable level. I don't know what the zoning codes on the Sword Coast look like, but it would be really nice to have my brewery down in the cellar and the guest rooms upstairs. Having to fit everything onto a single, somewhat cramped flat surface was a little bit annoying, and made my inn feel less like a real place. If I could make one request, it would definitely be allowing multiple floors.
As my inn became more cramped, though, the world also opened up with the introduction of a regional map that allowed me to share quests with any party who had stayed the night previously. Each quest has a difficulty class that must be beaten by rolling a d20, featuring a great little animation to sell that D&D feeling. And different parties are better suited to some than others, both based on the type of party they are, the type of challenge, their level, and the special traits each of their members might possess.
In exchange for your intel, a successful group of heroes will bring back reagents and ingredients for you that become necessary for higher-level recipes. These concoctions can then attract higher-level parties who can go on more dangerous adventures for more potent and sought-after goodies, and so on. I liked the way this emphasized the role of the tavern in the overall regional adventurer economy. At this point, it really did feel like this was the place newly-created player characters showed up to seek rumors of treasure and glory.
From here, things settled into a comfortable rhythm. By day, my boarders would follow my tips out into the treacherous wilds, hopefully not die, and return with ingredients. By night, I'd serve my latest concoctions to increasingly prestigious and demanding guests – it's even possible, we were told, to get some big shots like Minsc from the Baldur's Gate series passing through. And as my treasure chest swelled, I unlocked new machines like a cider press and fresh decorations to keep the new guests impressed. Adding more bedrooms means being able to get more quests done.
This is all accompanied by some delightfully jaunty tavern music, though it comes from nowhere in particular. It would have been neat if I could invite different bards to play and entertain my guests and staff. There are a couple other odd limitations, too, like the fact that the starting bar counter – the only one I saw, though it's possible something bigger unlocks later – can only stock two kinds of drinks. So it didn't take long for me to have far more recipes than I was allowed to serve, which felt unfortunate.
The next step is adding food to the menu, and I only got to mess with that a little bit in the time I had with the demo. All in all, despite its limitations, running a small business in a recognizable fantasy setting was both rewarding and relaxing in Dungeons & Dragons: Long Rest Tavern. Getting to roll some dice during the day is a snappy, exciting shot of adventure to break up the evenings of running around cleaning up after the intrepid heroes of the Realms. And the steady stream of unlocks kept me wanting to grow my little establishment, even as it made me lament the lack of stairs.
You'll be able to pull up a chair at the tavern yourself in 2027.
While you're here, check out these recent previews of other big upcoming games we've checked out recently!
Leana Hafer is a contributing freelancer for IGN with a specialty in RPGs, strategy, horror, and survival games. She has been reviewing video games professionally since 2010 and is one of IGN's most prolific contributors, with more than 100 reviews published. You can also find her work on sites like PC Gamer and PCGamesN.
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