Find love in this tavern
Love Tavern's review
Developer: Secret Labo
Genre: Management Sim, Match-3
Reviewed version: v1.1.2
Censored: No
Patch Needed: Yes (Free DLC)
OS: Windows
Language: English, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Thai
Love Tavern is a management game with some elements that make it unique and spicy content to well… spice things up. As a fan of the genre, I couldn’t help but give it a try as soon as I had the chance.
Pros
Beautiful art
Solid and addictive gameplay
Decent story
Cons
The sound quality in the mini-stories section could be better
Story
Love Tavern's story is decent even if it's not deep, and it does a good job of justifying the gameplay. In it, you take the role of an average guy living an ordinary life; that’s it until he has a… “fateful encounter” with Truck-kun and gets isekai’d into a medieval world full of elves, catgirls, angels, succubuses, and other fantastical creatures. Each girl also has a backstory (save for the human filler characters), making them more than just a cute waifu to hire.
Art
One of the most important aspects of an H-game is its art, and this game doesn’t disappoint. The anime-styled images used in the characters’ profiles and mini-stories are beautiful, and the cutesy look the chibi characters give the management section fits the game’s overall aesthetic. The adult content included in the DLC is also well done, though there’s only one scene for each girl (save for the 2-star humans, which have none). To see them, you have to either complete the girl’s mini-story or spy on them while they are tending to your customers’ “needs” in the massage room.
Gameplay
The game is way more complete than your average management game. While it features the usual elements in the genre like getting ingredients to make food, hiring people, and so on, it also adds some tweaks here and there that make them stand out. For example, cooking requires you to stop a heat meter at the right moment to prepare a meal. Stopping it too soon or too late will make you lose the ingredients you spent on it, but your proficiency level increases if you do it at the right moment, allowing you to cook that meal automatically once it’s maxed out.
Getting ingredients is also a bit more complex than the norm. To get them, you need to hire and send adventurers on a quest for a specific amount of time. You can choose between a short quest, a medium one, or a long one, and the amount of ingredients you get is proportional to the amount of time the adventurer is on a quest. You can also buy some at the shop, but their stock is very limited and it refreshes every 25 minutes.
Leveling up your tavern unlocks different buildings like a sauna, and massage rooms, among others, but also increases the game’s difficulty. Your employees get sick from time to time and need to be treated at the clinic, and you need to hire cleaners to clean the rooms that get dirty. Furthermore, you have to keep an eye on your finances once you reach level 3 because you get the chance to either increase profits or get better hires for 25 minutes if you finish a week with a positive net income.
Managing a tavern is not the only thing the game has. Each of the characters’ mini-stories includes a short match-3 game at the end of each chapter. In it, you have to clear different goals, like matching 9 specific tiles, moving a heart-shaped one to the bottom of the grid, and breaking special tiles.
Sound
Sound-wise is so-so. The soundtrack itself is fine and helps build the high-fantasy vibe of the game, but there are some issues in the mini-stories. The sound that plays every time you pass the dialogue in the VN segment gets annoying quickly, and some of the English voice recordings are too quiet and/or feel like they weren’t recorded with the proper equipment (the Japanese VO in the sex scenes is fine, though).
Verdict: Fantastic
Love Tavern turned out to be way more enjoyable than I initially expected, to the point I recommend any fan of management games to give it a try. It’s a bit rough around the edges in some aspects—like most early access games are—but it keeps improving with each update it gets.