Dungeon Inn: running an inn while keeping two rival guilds from meeting

You are Sara. You struck a deal with a dragon to open an inn right next to a mysterious dungeon that appeared near its lair.

Adventurers from rival guilds want to explore that dungeon. Your inn is the perfect stop on their route.

Your problem: keeping them from crossing paths.

The good idea

Most inn management games ask you to serve fast and well. This one asks you to serve two sides who hate each other without either noticing.

That is a complete change of nature. Your constraint is not speed, it is scheduling. You attract adventurers using various tools, turn by turn, and above all you time one group's arrival so it does not overlap another's departure.

The studio sums up the morality with cheerful frankness: who cares if they are rivals, as long as we do not get caught everyone is happy, especially your coin purse.

And when a guild clash becomes inevitable on your doorstep, you have to keep the secret: you send in covert armoured wisps to tip the scales in one guild's favour and reduce suspicion on your double-dealing.

Armoured wisps dispatched quietly to rig a brawl outside your door so you do not get suspected. I find that very well thought out, and very funny.

There are also special situations to arbitrate: serving fine wine or black tea, handling a rowdy guest who breaks your plates. Your decisions have consequences.

What players say

629 positive reviews out of 675, or 93 per cent. And the picture is very consistent.

It is cosy without being soft. One player sums it up perfectly: a cosy strategy game, not frustrating, but which nevertheless requires a little foresight in the later levels. Another describes a game that is challenging while remaining restful.

That is a difficult balance, and apparently struck.

The characters work. The story is called cute, the characters funny, and several players cite the writing before the mechanics. In a management game, that is not common.

And the approach is judged fresh. One player talks about a new angle on the business management genre, which is exactly what I thought reading the store page.

The complaints, and they are sharp

They deserve stating, because the game goes 1.0 on 23 October and they describe what needs fixing.

It is thin over time. The best-argued complaint comes from a player who pushed twelve weeks on the highest difficulty and concludes: the art is beyond reproach, but the game itself is too slight. He finds the possibilities limited and the end of them visible fast.

And sometimes chance decides. The same player explains that landing the top rating is sometimes purely down to the roll, and that restarting repeatedly eventually wears thin. He adds a line that captures the risk in this genre: restarting is not a problem in itself, but when the positive feedback from clearing a level is limited, replaying to scrape a rating feels like housework.

That is precise and accurate criticism. A cosy management game has to reward enough for repetition to stay pleasant.

It feels like a mobile game. Two independent players say so. One notes the animations are very basic and that it reminds him of paper cut-out games. The other, while positive, reckons the game would do very well on mobile.

That is not an insult, but it is information: if you expect a management game rich in animation and on-screen life, you will find this static.

And bugs remain. One player reports a blocker in the middle of the mandatory tutorial, which stops him starting at all. That is exactly what a 1.0 must have cleared.

What I think

There is a design idea in Dungeon Inn I have not seen elsewhere, and it is a good one: making secrecy the central resource of a management game.

You are not managing stock, you are managing information. And your entire prosperity rests on two groups of customers not talking to each other.

That is clever, it is funny, and it is served by art direction everybody praises, including the people who dislike the rest.

The problem is the one facing many good small-studio ideas: it holds for about twenty hours and does not yet know what to offer afterwards. The announced endless mode is meant to answer that, even if the most critical player explains he does not want to finish story mode enough to care.

At 15.49 euros, on 23 October, here is how I would decide.

If you want a cosy management game with a real idea behind it and characters you want to see again, go ahead, two thirds of your time will be excellent.

If you judge a management game on its mechanical depth and replayability, wait and see what the 1.0's endless mode is worth.

Ever let two rival guilds cross paths by accident? That is the best moment in the game and it needs discussing on the InsertCoins Discord.