Home / Features /Now in Early Access, Dungeon Inn is a delightfully wicked tavern management game ByChris McMullen 1 December 202430 November 2024
Want to run a fantasy tavern, where every guest leaves a little wiser and a little more enriched, where their happiness is your only concern? Currently in Steam Early Access, Dungeon Inn is not that game, despite describing itself as ‘cozy’. Instead, a sizeable chunk of its appeal comes from hoodwinking your customers and getting away with it.
The premise is that you’ve gone into business with a gold-hoarding dragon, opening a dungeon-side inn that caters to two adventurers guilds who hate each other. Are these, terrible, terrible decisions? Yes. Is Dungeon Inn a ridiculous amount of moustache-twirling fun? Also yes.
What separates Dungeon Inn from the various other tavern sims out there is the amount of strategy and deception that goes into keeping your enterprise afloat. Patrons don’t just materialise outside your door; you get to watch them wander down one of two roads, one per guild. Turn by turn they come, but the trick is to make sure opposing guild members don’t meet, otherwise there’ll be an almighty brawl outside your inn.
That’s not the end of the world, but depending on how you handle it, each or both guilds will become more suspicious of your double-dealing. So you set up distractions to slow them down, ply them with energy drink to speed them up and generally juggle the flow of customers.
There’s a real art to it, and I wasn’t kidding about the moustache-twirling; internally, I muahahaha‘d every time I pulled the wool over a guild member’s eyes, pointing them to their room, or to their lodge’s bar, before their mortal enemy waltzed in. It helps that protagonist Sara and her two cat people pals, Butter and Bami, don’t have the aforementioned moustaches. Instead, they have a thoroughly wholesome veneer, enhanced by the game’s downright gorgeous art-style.
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Dungeon Inn isn’t short on challenges, sometimes linked to specific story beats. You can expand your inn in various ways, perfect for raising a little more cash. But several turns after proudly adding a pub to my inn (I know that seems backwards), a hard-drinking legendary hero waltzed in. Before I could blink, he was getting into a drunken brawl with the opposing guild.
Little events like this also help make Dungeon Inn feel like it has a tale to tell. I’ve only been playing for a few in-game weeks and I suspect that, even if you can manage to keep the guilds’ suspicions to a tolerable level, the trio is heading for a fall, at least when the game exits Steam Early Access.
The game’s turn-based client-juggling won’t be for those who want a purely cozy game, but I loved visiting the Dungeon Inn and I won’t be checking out any time soon. Dungeon Inn is available now on PC, in Steam Early Access.
