I’m sure most of us are familiar with the common trope that bartenders hear all kinds of stories from their bar’s customers, especially as the night grows later and the alcohol continues to flow. What we’ve got here is Tavern Talk Stories: Dreamwalker, in which you play as a barkeep at a high-fantasy tavern. Tavern Talk Stories: Dreamwalker, developed and published by Gentle Troll Entertainment, is a prequel to the original Tavern Talk. If you haven’t played Tavern Talk, don’t worry – you don’t need to be familiar with the first game at all to play Tavern Talk Stories: Dreamwalker.

If you’ve played any of the Coffee Talk games, much of Dreamwalker’s core gameplay will be familiar to you. The main difference between the two is that in Dreamwalker, the drinks you serve your patrons help them in practical ways while they’re adventuring, rather than simply keeping them awake or helping them unwind after a long day. Your tavern’s visitors all fit RPG class archetypes, and RPG characters are known for questing above all else. Each customer has five stats that are affected by the drinks you serve them: Strength, Intelligence, Charisma, Dexterity, and Defense. I’ll call these “the five stats.”

Each of the potions you can combine to create beverages changes at least one of these five stats in some way, either positively or negatively. You will have to pay close attention to what any given customer says to ensure you serve them a drink that has their desired effects. To its credit, Dreamwalker has several different, yet intertwined ways to help you keep track of pretty much everything you’ll need to know. For starters, you have a lot you can reference at any time while mixing drinks. Your log is full of helpful information that falls into various categories.

Your log will tell you things like what you have learned about each customer you’ve met, what the five stats do, recipes for named mixed drinks you know how to make, and how each potion you can mix into a drink will affect the stats of its recipient. When you’re creating a drink from a recipe, you can have your octopus helper friend draw a chart of that drink’s effects on the five stats on a chalkboard for you. That’s one of multiple handy visual references Dreamwalker gives you to help you make the exact drink each visitor wants.

As your patrons talk with you and each other, they’ll sometimes mention snippets about various goings-on around the world. When you’ve learned enough related information about a subject, you’ll be able to combine it all into a quest. You post quests you form on a notice board in your tavern, where they’ll eventually be taken on by the adventurers who visit your establishment. Since I’m a total sucker for this kind of high-fantasy stuff, the idea of being an innkeeper who can both give out quests and provide drinks that help adventurers excel on said quests is extremely appealing to me.

You don’t charge your customers any form of currency in exchange for the drinks and lodging you provide at your tavern. Instead, when you send someone on a quest, you ask that they repay you by returning to your tavern after said quest and telling you the story of how it went. I feel compelled to point out that that exposes the question of how you could afford to pay any business expenses or turn a profit, but I’m probably reading way too deeply into that. Customers will also occasionally give you new potions you can mix into different drinks.

Drink-mixing is the part of the core gameplay loop about which I’m most conflicted. I really like the fact that there’s no time pressure and that you can freely discard any mistakes you make with no penalty. You discard drinks by feeding them to your magical familiar, Captain Beebug, who is utterly adorable. You’ll notice in your log that certain words are in bold type within the descriptions of drinks you can make. Those are usually keywords that explain the effects a particular drink will have on its imbiber. Those hints can be helpful, but that’s uncommon in my experience.

Since customers will usually just tell you what they want a drink to taste like or how they want it to make them feel rather than requesting a certain drink by name, you’re left to figure out what concoction to mix for them. That’s why, more often than not, those keywords listed in your log are more of a hindrance than a help in my experience. As far as I can tell, you can’t mix recipes of named drinks to create new concoctions. Assuming I’m not mistaken about that, that often makes mixing the perfect drink very tricky, if not impossible.

For example, there was one point where a customer asked me for a drink that would affect the five stats in a way that boosted both their courage and motivation. Confused, I thought aloud to myself, “Okay, I can make two different drinks that each have one of those properties, but I can only serve you one drink, and it seems I’m not allowed to combine their recipes, so what am I supposed to do here?” I admit that, when it comes to games with open-ended choice mechanics like this, I prefer to have everything bluntly spelled out for me.

Granted, that does take away the sense of catharsis and satisfaction I get when I successfully deduce something without extra help, but losing that is a sacrifice I’m willing to make if it means I won’t be made to feel like an idiot for guessing incorrectly. That’s also why figuring out the proper way to mix drinks that have the customer’s requested effects on the five stats isn’t fun for me. That would be a lot more obnoxious if I didn’t have the time and freedom to experiment until I stumbled upon a potential solution, but I don’t enjoy actually doing that experimentation.

I think I would enjoy Tavern Talk Stories: Dreamwalker a lot more if it were more of a “pure” visual novel than it is. Not everyone who plays Tavern Talk Stories: Dreamwalker will be as clueless when it comes to intuition and drink mixing as I am. While I give Dreamwalker a lot of credit for all the assistance it provides to players by default, I still wish it had ways of spelling things out even more directly for players (like me) who need even more help. Because of that, I can neither recommend nor condemn Tavern Talk Stories: Dreamwalker.

A PC review copy of Tavern Talk Stories: Dreamwalker was provided by Gentle Troll Entertainment for this review.

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Tavern Talk Stories: Dreamwalker

$14.99

6.5

Score

6.5/10

Pros

• You can freely experiment with drinks without any external pressure.
• Several convenient ways to keep track of relevant information.
• Enjoyable soundtrack, especially on the main menu.
• Wonderful setting and atmosphere.

Cons

• Pouring potions into drinks could be an accessibility concern.
• Progress doesn’t appear to autosave.
• Some players might need even more help than what’s already provided.