On top of all of this is a strange, unpleasant lingering taste in your mouth about the tone of the game in general. It takes a while to understand that the difference between mixed and blended drinks is a matter of watching the lump of pixels that represents the cocktail shaker for five seconds more before serving, or that aging a drink is just a matter of clicking on the clock. The bartending aspect is also barely explained to you, and whether that’s part of the fun of figuring it out or just an assumption that the player has a basic knowledge of mixology is unclear. Sometimes those conversations are interesting and give you an insight into the gritty and corrupt world outside your saloon doors, but they really drag on when you have to click every two seconds. The game is reduced to what seems like endless clicking as the bar conversations drag on and on and on, displayed only ten to twenty words at a time on the screen. Remembering people’s favourites will also get you far, unlocking new conversation threads as you go.īut as interesting as it sounds, this process becomes dull and mechanical very early on. Someone asks for something bitter, and you search for “bitter” in the recipe list. Someone asks for something big, and you double the ingredients. Bartending is treated as a puzzle: someone asks, cryptically, for a cold drink, and you know to find something “on the rocks”.

Bartender game