I give this one 3.5 stars, and my heart leans toward 4. I tend to like these kind of tavern/brothel manager sims, and there is a lot to like here. But there’s a lot to dislike as well. Small spoilers ahead.

You were an orphan, a shithead petty criminal, then an adventurer, and finally, you scrimped and saved enough to run your shitty tavern. Cooking is your real ion in life, and you’re good at it, but your rat-infested bar isn’t exactly pulling in classy customers. Business isn’t going well and your tavern is in debt to some pretty scary folks, but you think you’ve found a way to turn it around. In short order (<10 minutes into the game), you experience a sudden, unexpected betrayal, and your tavern is nearly completely destroyed. You get a small extension on your ebt, but you’ve gotta come up with the cash in short order. You decide to go back to adventuring. People are willing to pay a little money for adventurers completing tasks, and more importantly, you’ll be able to source cooking ingredients for your tavern. Along the way, you bump into heroines who your party, helping you during your quests and acting as service staff for the tavern. You serve customers, earn the patronage of a few key people along the way, and end up tangling with criminal organizations, the nobility and anti-government groups. The story ends up being more complex and enjoyable than expected.

The gameplay is run on a calendar, giving you a certain amount of days to achieve certain objectives (starting with repayment of your debt). You can choose to spend a day doing quests, or you can spend it operating your tavern. You’ll need to do both to earn the resources necessary to progress.

Your quest board offers you one or two real quests with story relevance and significant rewards (mainly recipes and access to new ingredients), plus a variety of replayable missions with minor rewards (reups on ingredients, plus whatever monster drops you get). Real quests make you trudge through a series of JRPG style random encounters on the way to an event or boss. The replayable missions allow you to skip the gameplay, instantly coming back with the XP, loot and rewards. The combat isn’t anything special, but there is some variety in character skills to keep things interesting, and you have to strategize around the “sexual harassment” mechanic: every so many steps, you build up enough sexual tension to feel up one of your party , refreshing their mana. Strategizing and pacing around this mechanic is one of the few novel things about the combat here. The amount of mana they recover is proportional to the strength of your relationship with that character, giving you an immediate reason to develop their affection, especially for mana-hungry characters. You don’t know what kind of enemies you’ll run into before you start the quest, and you can’t switch party once you do, so my general approach was to keep at least one party member on hand with strong AOE presence and give her most of my attention.

The tavern side is your main means of making money, and unfortunately, it feels a bit underdeveloped. The basic gameplay loop is to choose your menu for the night, making sure that all of the basics menu needs are met (meat, grains, vegetables, alcohol, and later, fish). These needs never change, so you’re basically just choosing the most lucrative recipes you know and have enough ingredients for. Running the tavern without this will cripple your money gain and actually lose you reputation (necessary to increase money gain going forward), so there’s really no decision to make here beyond maximizing the sell price of the dishes you select. If you don’t have the ingredients, you choose something else or don’t open the tavern that day. Pretty short decision tree. Once you do open the tavern, you… watch the money come in. There is zero interactivity in the tavern scenes. Later on into the game, you will unlock “VIP service” rooms and a full-on brothel; you can peek in on these during the tavern operation scenes, but all you’ll see is pretty weak pixel art. These activities do unlock some nice CG scenes, but they’re only available from the main menu, not from within the game itself. For me, these scenes ended up piling up in the background while I was playing the main game, and going back to watch them ended up being a bit of a chore. Nevertheless, it is satisfying watching the numbers go up as customers pay for their meals and services in real time. At the end of your shift, you’ll see how much money and reputation you earned for the night. As expected, over the course of the game, you start off broke as hell and end up making more money than you could possibly spend.

Once you’ve earned enough money to do so, you can spend money on renovation, ingredients for recipes, or “training” for your heroines. The renovations are pretty boring. Most of them are just flat boosts to reputation, which helps you bring in more customers, but the increase is hard to quantify in dollars. Eventually, you just run out of upgrades to buy, and for me, that happened while there was still about half of the game left to go. There are few upgrades for VIP services and basically no upgrades for the brothel beyond two extra rooms. Training your heroines is expensive (too expensive, imo – I ended up doing 80% of my training in the last 30% of my gameplay) and requires you to level up your party ’ affection first, but it unlocks BDSM scenes/CGs and new skills for your party .

The sexual content is solid but inconsistent. The actual CGs are really good throughout, and the general scene setups are usually good. In addition to the story-driven sex scenes, each girl has a couple of vanilla sex scenes unlocked through affection/gift giving; a handful of BDSM scenes ulocked through training; and some NTR/voyeur scenes unlocked through sexual services in the tavern. If you watch all of the girls’ tavern scenes, you get a couple bonus NTR gangbang scenes as well. The pixel art sexual content is mixed in quality: the tavern/brothel animations are pretty lackluster, and the girls are basically just recolors of one another, but the sexual harassment pixel art is really high quality. Then there’s this random third art style when you go into the girls’ rooms to talk or give gifts, which feels like a placeholder. This one is pretty bad, and unfortunately, one entire sex scene for each girl is in this style.

I think where this game shines is in its characters. Your player character feels and looks like a generic stand-in at first, complete with shaded-out eyes. But as the game progresses, you realize that he’s actually a pretty fleshed-out character. He’s got reasonable motivations and unique relationship dynamics with each heroine. The heroines themselves are all unique, and they interact with one another in ways that feel well-considered. This isn’t the next great novel, but they do a good job of making the characters feel unique and grounded. And that contributes to the story and the sex scenes alike. I found myself looking forward more to BDSM scenes with this character, NTR scenes with that character, vanilla scenes with this other character… to me, that’s a sign of good writing. Even the various petty villains get love from the writer. They’re all shitheads in their own unique way, and they come back repeatedly to piss you off in new and funny ways.

Overall I think it’s worth playing. There’s probably around 10 hours of content in this game – more than I was expecting. This game feels like its makers put a lot of thought and work into it, but it also feels like it was made by one or two people with very little artistic chops (plus an artist contracted out for CGs), and if you make it to the credits, that’s exactly what it is. I hope these guys make more games and carry some lessons forward from this one.