Barfender: my idiotic friend drank all the beers

Barfender's shortest Steam review is six words: my idiotic friend drank all the beers.

It is positive. Of course it is positive.

What the game promises, and it is not lying

The first line of the description is a perfectly honest contract: serve drinks while your bar falls apart.

And the studio spells it out, without boasting about anything.

Customers get drunk, impatient, and start fights. Orders pile up faster than you can handle. Glasses shatter and the mess keeps spreading. Unwanted guests wander in, and thieves grab what they can.

So your job is to serve, clean up disasters, stop fights, and hold the whole thing together before it completely collapses.

There is something restful about a store page that does not promise you will succeed.

Why it works

Because the chaos is not a design accident, it is the product.

Most restaurant simulators sell you mastery: you learn the circuit, you optimise your movements, and the pleasure comes from the fluidity you reach. Those are good games, and they require calm.

Barfender sells the opposite. It stacks disruptions until nobody can control anything, and it bets that four people failing together have more fun than one person succeeding.

One player describes nine hours straight with a friend. Another says you completely lose track of time. A third explains the game went immediately into his friend group's rotation.

Those are the only three metrics that matter for this kind of game.

And then there is that line in the description I find perfect: maybe do not smash a beer mug into your teammate's face. Or do.

The customers have personalities

That is the detail lifting the game above a mere disorder generator.

Polite regulars, rowdy drunks, hopeless romantics, bar brawlers. Each behaves in their own way.

Which means the bar is not an abstract queue, it is a room full of people whose types you learn to recognise. You end up watching somebody walk in and knowing what will happen in ten minutes.

And you can style your bar however you like. The studio adds, because it knows itself: then pray the crowd does not tear it apart.

The reservations, and they are clear

96 positive reviews out of 98. And the only negative one is useful, because it is specific.

The waiters get stuck. One player reports that hired staff get caught behind the bar stools while fetching an order, and then do nothing. In a game whose whole subject is being overwhelmed, an AI that freezes in the wrong spot is not a comic detail, it is one employee down.

Staff types are missing. A player with nine hours sums it up well: you can only hire waiters. He wants dishwashers, bouncers, something else. In a bar where fights are part of the furniture, the absence of a bouncer is almost a joke.

And bar progression is limited. The same player finds expanding the venue too constrained. That is the classic early access complaint, and it is also the sign of somebody who has already seen everything there is.

The price makes some wince. One player feels ten euros, even as an introductory rate, is a lot for what is there today. I understand the argument, even if nine hours of play for ten euros remains a good ratio from any angle.

And the number I could not ignore

As I write, Barfender has exactly 666 players online at once.

For a game where you serve drinks until everything catches fire, I cannot imagine a better coincidence.

What to take from it: this is early access, there are named things missing, and nobody is hiding that.

But it is also one of those games whose only argument is making four people laugh for an evening, and which achieves that without pretending to anything else. At ten euros, in a genre that often sells us progression systems in place of pleasure, that is an honest proposition.

Take it if you have a group. Do not take it if you play alone: the game is literally called a co-op bar simulator.

Did your idiotic friend drink all the beers? There is a support group on the InsertCoins Discord.