#51 - Tavern Manager Simulator

How do you do, fellow gamers?  I'm back with another set of video game screenshots!  And today's game is a simulator game.  I actually love simulator games; I have a whole category in my Steam library dedicated to them.  It's the only library collection I've made that's specifically for a genre of game.

I got Tavern Manager Simulator on sale yesterday, and whereas there are probably better simulator games in my collection, I did enjoy this one in particular.

It opens with you acquiring a run-down tavern just outside a large castle.  The place is boarded up and you need to remove some planks in order to get in the back door and open up the tavern.

The place is in disrepair and you spend some time picking up trash and cleaning stains on the floor before you can open the place.

The large piles of garbage are too much for you to deal with right now, so you just throw a cloth over them to get the place open and running.

You have a small private room just off to the side of the bar room.  There's a bed in here where you can sleep until 6 AM the next morning.  There's also a desk where you do all the "paperwork" for the tavern.  This desk is where you can upgrade your tavern and its amenities.  The more you level up your tavern, the more variety of foods you can sell, and the larger the tavern will grow.  Literally; it will actually expand into a proper dining hall if you upgrade it enough.

Although the most important category is the Delivery tab, where you can order resources (food), furniture, and decorations.

You will need to make regular food orders as your supplies dwindle.  You can place an order anytime and it will be at your back door in less than a minute.  You can actually watch a horse-drawn cart show up down the road as soon as you order.  Almost half the wait time is just watching it turn in a loop before stopping for you to unload it.

Next, you need to fix your sign out front.  This is what you will use to signal when you're open.

When it's facing the tavern, you're closed.  But when it's turned to face the road passing by your tavern, you're open.  You can switch it anytime, day or night, to start or stop the flow of customers.  You can also customize your new sign.  Here is my tavern's sign, turned to signal that I'm open for business:

To start, you'll only have ale.  Pouring ale is a bit of an art; you have to hold the pour button until it fills to the green line on a bar.  Any less and it's just a "good" ale.  In that green, it's a "perfect" ale and will have a sparkle to it. And if you go over, you will spill on the floor (requiring a clean-up) and it will be a "bad" ale, with a puke-greenish tint to it.

Make sure you hand out as many good or perfect ales as you can to customers!  You're earning reputation to help improve your customer base and upgrade your tavern, so keep those customers happy!  I don't know what the customers will do if you serve them a bad ale.  I've just been dumping them in the trash and taking the financial loss so I don't hurt my reputation.  Here was my very first customer:

You have a limited supply of dishes, so make sure to clean them as often as you can in the kitchen sink.  You can get water from the well behind your tavern, and every dish you scrub counts for 2 cleaned dishes.  It's super easy to clean, just swirl it in the soapy water for a few seconds and all the gunk will disappear from the dish.

You also have to clean your tavern as you go.  Most patrons will leave a mess on the table when they leave.  Collect their coin and dishes, but also don't forget to wipe down the tables as needed.  Some customers will also leave footprints all over your floors.  Don't forget to sweep them up!

Most customers will only make a single food/drink request, then leave when they're done.  But this guy kept requesting more beers until he passed out on the bar.  You can literally pick up these drunk customers by the scruff of their neck and toss them out.  You can also ask anyone to leave anytime you want, but it's more fun to throw them out while they're black-out drunk.  Plus, you collect a ton of coin from all the booze they consumed.

There are also beggars who might come into your tavern.  You can give them what they ask for, which will give your tavern a boost in reputation, or you can tell them to scram.  Later, you acquire a frying pan, which you can brandish as a weapon against unruly patrons or beggars.

This beggar lady came by pretty often.  I had one guy come by saying he was dying of thirst and just needed some water.  I went to the well out back and got a pail of water and he was very satisfied with that.

Over time, you start to expand the menu; first to sausage, then vegetable soup, and then grilled meat.  It gets more complicated as you go on, because you now have to pay attention to customer's requests and not just hand out ale to every customer.  Eventually, your kitchen gets fixed up as you level up your tavern and expand your menu.  It starts to look like a nice place to work!

You will also unlock fairy helpers, whom you can assign jobs in the tavern.  Which is nice when you have to cook soup, grill meat, chop firewood for the stove and grill, pour ale, clean the outhouse, and do dishes.  PLUS ensuring customers are getting the food they want in a timely manner, cleaning up after them, and ordering more food when your supplies are getting low.  It can get intense.  Thankfully, I have not been completely swamped with customers yet.  I got maybe 1-3 orders at a time, so I have a little time to balance everything.  Just having a fairy to do dishes is a huge relief during open hours.

When you're closed up for the day, if you explore the grounds outside your tavern, you'll find hidden tributes to other medieval fantasy series.  So far, I've seen references to Zelda, Dark Souls, Shrek, World of Warcraft, and Lord of the Rings.  Let me know if you find any others!

If you catch a break (which I rarely did), you can chat with your customers, which gives you a +1 to your reputation.  Although they usually just have either something weird to say, or a medieval dad joke.

Overall, this was a very enjoyable game.  I had fun running back and forth, trying to keep food and drink prepared and dealing with customers as they came in.  I had to make a lot of orders in the middle of the day to keep my stock up initially, but as I got used to the game, I was able to more effectively plan my food and drink and I was mostly able to make an order at night and be ready for the entire next day. It helps that none of the consumables ever went bad, so I could prep a bunch of stuff and leave it sitting out until customers ordered it.

I always felt there weren't enough hours in the day, though.  Every minute of the day was a real-time second, so I basically had 24 minutes max to host customers every day.  I'd run my tavern until I was almost out of everything late at night, then I'd spend the last few hours of the night/morning restocking and prepping for the next day.  If I went to bed, it was usually with only an hour or two of sleep before getting up the next day.  So far, I don't think sleep deprivation is a thing in this game.  I ran my tavern for 3 days straight without any side effects at one point.

So if you like restaurant managing/waitressing games, this was a pretty fun medieval spin on the genre.  Come grab a pint and enjoy!

#50 - Remember Me

Happy (belated) Veteran's Day!  Sorry for posting this so late; I'm a recently retired veteran, so yesterday ended up busier than I expected.

And speaking of busy... I started these daily posts as 1.) a writing challenge for myself, 2.) a way to geek out about the games that I've been enjoying lately, and 3.) with the hope of adding some interesting and unique content to online communities.  But my ADHD/hyper-focus has been taking the wheel lately, and I've been taking longer and longer to write these up, not counting the several hours of gaming I do every night to acquire screenshots in the first place.

I was trying to find something to play the night before last and I ended up bouncing between several games that I just couldn't get into.  Then I found Remember Me and it was so much fun, I didn't want to stop playing to write about it.  I stayed up until dawn playing, then had so much on my schedule for that day, I didn't have time to write until later that night.

Basically, I've been spending most of my free time preparing these posts (which is a lot, considering I'm 100% retired now), and as much fun as it is, I need to cut back a bit and focus on other stuff in my life.  Like actually finishing some of the fun and interesting games I've been writing about.  I can't complete most of these games in a single night, despite my best efforts.  But I don't want to make multiple posts about the same game several days in a row; I want to provide new and interesting content for you to read.

I'm not going to stop writing detailed (and spoiler-free) posts about video games, but I will cut back a bit on my posting schedule so it's not eating up all my free time.  I never promised to do daily posts anyway; that was just a personal writing goal of mine and I've made it to 50 posts with only 3 days missed (including this one), so I'd consider that a win.  I'll try to aim for an absolute minimum of a post a week; although I may post more often as I find and play interesting games.  I still have a list of games I want to write about, so there's still plenty of content to come.

All of my screenshot posts have been archived here.  I draft them on this blog initially, then copy/paste to other online communities and post both simultaneously.  I have another blog where I review movies, although I've been ignoring it for over a year now and would like to get back into it; another reason I want to slow down these gaming posts.  You can find a link to that blog on my profile if you're interested.

And now back to today's game...

Remember Me is a fascinating cyberpunk game taking place in Neo-Paris in the year 2084, a dark future where people have merged their brains with technology and can now have their memories accessed digitally.  This has created a market for buying, selling and trading memories.  This has also led to a surveillance society, where corporations can access memories and either wipe or replace them as they desire.

You play a French woman named Nilin, a memory hunter who can not only access memories, but has the extremely rare skill of editing details within them to give a person false memories.  She's part of an underground resistance movement, fighting against Memorize, a corporation trying to create a monopoly on human memories.  She's classified as an Errorist, which is not only the name for people who can create "error" or false memories, but is also a brilliant take on the word "terrorist."

I'd like to point out that this is a game developed by a French studio, the story takes place in Paris, and the French language is written on signs and billboards and graffiti throughout the game's world, so I felt it was appropriate to play this game in French with English subtitles to get the full effect.  It's such a beautiful language and it felt wrong to play this game in English.  Especially when Nilin has a British-English accent in the English version.

Unfortunately, this game originally released in 2013, so it wasn't designed for 4K displays and despite having that resolution option on the Steam version, the subtitles don't scale to the size of my screen.  They're extremely tiny in these screenshots, so I apologize in advance for that.  If you see a fuzzy white line across the bottom of a screenshot, open the image in a new tab and you can zoom in to read the subtitle.

Remember Me opens with Nilin squirming on the floor of a prison cell as her memories are erased.  When the procedure completes, a doctor approaches her and asks her name.  Surprisingly, she's able to remember her name!  She doesn't remember much else though, so the doctor consults the head of the department, Dr. Quaid, and Nilin is scheduled for a more detailed memory wipe to scrape out any remnants.

Barely able to stand, she's directed to follow an orange line down the hallway, where she joins a queue for another memory wipe.  While waiting in line, a voice pops into her head.  A guy by the name of Edge, who claims he's attempting to rescue her.

The power goes out and a blast door next to Nilin raises a little bit, exposing a small gap.  She's instructed to slip through the doorway.  Her escape is detected though and she's pursued by a large robot, which she's barely able to stumble away from in her dazed state.

Eventually, she falls down an air vent and stumbles across a machine loading up bodies into caskets.  She's told to climb into a casket, which she does begrudgingly.  The machine seals her in the casket, then launches her out of the prison facility and into a river.

Edge explains who Nilin is and why she's had her memory wiped.  Apparently, their resistance movement failed and everyone was rounded up except for their leader, Edge.  Nilin was his best fighter though, so he's rescued her so she can help recover their resistance.

Her casket drifts up to Slum 404, a garbage-filled slum of Neo-Paris.  She's freed by some scavengers known as Leapers.  The correlation to lepers is not lost; deformed and monstrous, they're the corrupted and insane remnants of citizens whose memories have been edited too many times.  Their instinct is to attack Nilin when they find her.

Suddenly remembering some basics on how to fight, Nilin is quick to take them down.  Her memories start coming back a little at a time throughout the game, although only enough for her to remember key details.  Edge informs her to travel to Tommy, her best friend and former memory hunter who is loyal to their cause.  He runs a bar in the slums called The Leaking Brain.

He is grateful to see her, even though she doesn't remember him.  He rescued her glove that she uses to manipulate memories, as well as her combat skin.  He comments that it's a good thing they caught her on her day off, or else they would've gotten their hands on her high-tech gear.

But just as soon as she's suited up, a bounty hunter jumps out of the shadows!  Olga Sedova, one of the best in the business, and she's out to collect the bounty on Nilin's head.

Before she can secure her though, Nilin gets her glove close enough to Olga's neck to grab hold of her memories.  We're transported into her memory from three hours ago, when Olga was at a hospital watching Dr. Quaid tend to her husband.

Her husband had deleted too many memories over time, causing a syndrome that is breaking down his mind.  It's implied that he may be turning into a Leaper.  Dr. Quaid promises he can fix it; although it will be very expensive.  A bounty for Nilin pops up and Olga promises she can pay, heading off to hunt Nilin.

At this point, you're able to fast-forward and rewind the memory, finding small glitches that you can edit in the details, like unfastening the husband's mask or removing one of his wrist straps.  Changing these little details leads to a different outcome for the memory.  Your goal is to find the right edits to make Dr. Quaid appear to have killed Olga's husband instead of saving him.

This part may take a while and some tinkering with various details until you find the right combination of edits, but once you figure it out, Olga is forced to watch as her husband dies a violent death due to Dr. Quaid's incompetence.  Snapping out of the memory, Olga suddenly decides to side with you as revenge against Memorize for killing her husband!  She offers to give you a lift to your next objective.

From here, you carry out missions for Edge, fight more people from your past whom you barely recall, return to the prison to regain more of your memories from their memory backups, and along the way, question who you really are and what you're actually fighting for.

This game is kind of like a cyberpunk version of Assassin's Creed.  You're part of a shady underground organization, sneaking around, climbing all over the structures of Neo-Paris, and fighting the controlling organization ruling over the land, all while stealing and/or editing people's memories.

You can't free-roam like in Assassin's Creed though; you're stuck on a singular path toward your objective, which prevents you from back-tracking even a couple rooms as you progress forward.  It does help keep you focused on the story, though.  I've played nearly 7 hours and I just finished episode 4 out of 8 total.  So the lack of exploration doesn't make this a quick story to burn through.

The combat is extremely fluid, too!  You have combo streaks that you can build yourself from various types of attacks (power, healing, cooldowns for special attacks, and chain abilities).  Completing combos will grant you points to eventually unlock even longer and more powerful combos, which can make defeating even the toughest enemies no effort at all.

Not to mention, Nilin is extremely light on her feet.  Every time an attack is incoming, you can just press your jump button and she immediately cartwheels out of the way, or even flips over enemies' heads if she's up close in combat.  You can weave and dodge in and out of a dozen enemies without taking any damage because they always indicate when they're about to strike.

You can also find collectibles in each level called Mnesist memories, which are cultural memories of Neo-Paris, preserving actual history so corruption from edited memories doesn't wash away what actually happened.  These are more background lore, if you're interested in world building.  They give a history of the fall of Paris during a global war in the 2040s and how Neo-Paris and its current social and economic structure sprouted from the ashes.  As well as many other detailed bits of lore to flesh out the world.

One of the only things I didn't enjoy about this game is the camera controls.  They're a bit dated and erratic.  It is an older game, so it doesn't have smooth modern camera controls.  It keeps trying to default the camera to a position that doesn't give a good view of your surroundings, so I found myself constantly adjusting the third-person camera, which didn't want to move smoothly and precisely most of the time.

Also, the shadows and lighting effects are pretty bad.  There were tons of dark scenes where I could hardly make out Nilin or others.  Her skin tone is so unnaturally dark and shaded in this game, it looks like she spent way too long in a tanning bed.  The only time she looks halfway normal is when her face is directly illuminated in a bright space.  But if the light wasn't directly on her face, even in bright sunlight, she was unnaturally shadowed.

But again, those are problems due to the age of the game.  Physics engines have evolved a ton in the past decade, and if this game was remade today, it would look absolutely stunning.  Even for its time, this is a gorgeous look into a future cyberpunk Paris.  And the story is captivating and kept me engaged for hours.  This is an incredible game, it just needs some tune-ups to the graphics and controls to be perfect.

The orchestral soundtrack gives this game a very cinematic feel, too.  I wish they released the soundtrack on Steam so I could listen to its music outside of gameplay.

#49 - Say No! More

Say No! More is a relatively short but comical game about empowering people to say "no" more often.  It mostly plays itself, with you interacting enthusiastically at key points throughout the gameplay.

The game starts with you creating a character.  You can pick one of their 16 presets, or create your own.  I modeled mine after my wife, because she's really good at saying "no." 😅

Next, you pick the way you say "no."  There are 17 languages, with both a masculine and feminine voice to choose from.  I think my favorite is Irish Gaelic.  Instead of a 2-letter word, theirs is long and super complicated sounding.

Then the game opens up on a video game called "Wizards of Nay," where you play as a wizard who fights imps and a Devil King by using the word "nay."

When you get a game over, it zooms out of your cell phone to show your character sitting on a park bench.  Your roommate approaches you and offers you a custom lunchbox he made, with a home-cooked meal inside.  How nice!

But was he just buttering you up?  Because the very next thing he asks is if you can cover the rent this month... AGAIN.  He has all sorts of excuses as to why.  He's short on cash, still job hunting, etc.  You try to respond to him and all you can muster is a "..."  Which he takes as "we'll discuss it later" and he lets you run off.  It's your first day of work at a new company!

You arrive at work and meet up with two other interns, who are already waiting with your new supervisor.  He reprimands you for being late and when you can't respond with an excuse, he threatens to fire you before lunch if you don't learn to speak up.  But he's one of those supervisors, who tries to play off all aggression as just a joke.

He instructs all three of you to say "yes" all the time if you want to promote within the company.  The other two interns are motivated and on board, but again, all you can muster is a weak "..."

He decides to have a practice run.  He claims he's hungry and wants your lunchbox.  What do you say to that...?

When you can't give a straight response, he laughs it off, saying it's just a joke and no one will take your lunch.  At least, not yet...

You and the other interns go off to the tiny cramped corner behind the vending machines that has your new desks.  After the other two interns are called away, your supervisor pokes his head around the corner and claims he actually forgot his lunch and really needs one today.  So...?

Unable to give a response, he takes it as a "yes" and runs off with your lunchbox.  You bang your head on your keyboard, defeated.

That is, until a cassette player drops on your head from somewhere. Inside is a cassette tape labeled, "NO!"  You put on some headphones and listen to it.

You're introduced to the confident voice of a motivational speaker!  He instructs you to have confidence in yourself and speak one magic word: NO!

He has you practice using the word a few times, then shows you how to laugh at people, to confuse them and break their confidence so your "no" is that much more powerful against them.

You chase down your supervisor in the office and use the new word you just learned against him.  It's super effective!

You relentlessly pursue him through the office, throwing your powerful word at him, attempting to shake him so he gives your lunchbox back.  All your coworkers jump in your way to ask you to do menial "intern tasks" for them, but you can knock them back with the word "no!"

From here, your lunchbox gets passed around to various levels of leadership in the office, while you continue to chase after it.

Thanks to the motivational speaker on your cassette tape, you learn how to say no in different ways to affect different types of people.  You have the standard angry no, but you will also learn a cold no, bored no, and wacky no.  On top of that, you learn an add-on response to shake your target and make your "no" more brutal.  You start with laughing at them before hitting them with a "no," but you will also learn how to slow clap, nod in agreement before saying "no," and a sarcastic "hmm" before landing that solid "no."

Eventually, your coworkers notice you speaking up against management and they start rallying behind you.  You go out to lunch together and teach them all how to say "no" as well.  Before you know it, you have a whole crowd of employees willing to say the word "no."

The game gets more wacky and outlandish as you go on, with all sorts of hilarious twists and turns to the plot.  It's a fun journey through a day in an office where the word "no" is banned.  Like I said, the game mostly plays itself and you just shout the word "no" at every opportunity you can.  You can probably beat it in about an hour, but it's so much fun, I've already played through it a few times.

Despite all its silliness, this game comes with a pretty decent moral at the end about standing up for yourself, but also knowing when to say "yes" too.  So take charge of your life!  Learn to say "no" instead of caving to social pressure!  And empower those around you!