Saloon Simulator: bartender by day, shady dealer by night, and the dishes in between

The whisky cocktail comes with a checklist. I am not joking: when a customer orders, a little card opens in a corner of the screen with steps to tick, from the right glass to the right measures, every ingredient in order. You grab each ingredient from a wheel, you pour, you shake, and the card fills up.

The first time, it is tedious. By the twentieth, you have the moves. And that is when Saloon Simulator becomes what it wants to be: not a management game seen from above, but a counter game, where you work with your hands while the room fills up behind you.

From honest trade to grey areas

The game leaves Early Access today, after sixteen months, and it shows in how much there is to do. You serve drinks, you cook in a pot with its own recipe to follow, you clean up after long nights. You open gambling tables, you rent out rooms, you hire staff to gradually hand off the tasks you no longer want to do yourself. And since the September update, you restore wagons for demanding customers, a full crafting minigame with its own orders and preferences.

Then the town of Blueberry starts making you offers. The game does not hide its subject: honest business is rarely enough, and shadier deals come along. It is the best part of the story, because it gives the customers meaning. Every face at the counter has its problems, and some of them drag you further than you meant to go.

First-person simulator fatigue

The flaw is the one shared by almost every simulator of this kind, and Saloon Simulator does not shake it off. Tasks repeat. Cocktails start to look alike, the dishes come back every night, and there is a point, around the ten-hour mark, where you wonder whether you are running a saloon or working overtime.

Staff is supposed to fix that, and it partly does. But the game pushes you to keep your hands on a lot of things, and the balance between what you delegate and what you do stays a bit fuzzy.

Early Access players were fairly kind: 89% of 882 reviews are positive. The most recent ones are a notch lower, 78% over the last thirty days, a sign that waiting for the full release left some people wanting. We will see whether the launch changes the trend.

At 18.49 euros, Saloon Simulator is a good bar simulator with a western atmosphere that works, characters with something to say and a real helping of content. If first-person management games bore you after five hours, it will not change your mind. If you like simulators where you work with your hands behind a counter, you will feel at home, with a revolver thrown in.

What cocktail do you serve Blueberry's newcomers first? The bartenders on the InsertCoins Discord all have a recipe.