Review: Tavern Talk Is Comfy, But Not Very Adventurous

Following in the footsteps of other visual novels like VA-11 HALL-A and Coffee Talk, Tavern Talk places you behind the counter of a medieval fantasy inn where you’ll meet and serve a gaggle of adventuring customers. You’ll hand out quests, as well as advice and drinks, influencing how various stories will play out from behind the counter of your cozy bar. While the tropes and motifs are well worn, they’re also fairly well-executed and the game as a whole avoids slipping from “wholesome” to “cloying” as some of its fellow travelers do, even if it can play it a bit too safe at times.

Tavern Talk is primarily a visual novel during which you also have to serve drinks to your patrons, brewed from a number of stat-boosting ingredients. These start out simple enough. A patron asks for something to boost their strength, and you make the drink with a lot of the strength ingredient. Naturally the difficulty increases as you unlock more recipes and the requests get less obvious, but the game also mixes things up with the quest system. As the natural hub for adventurers in the region, your tavern also serves as a place for people to post missions (or for you to post ones pieced together from a the ramblings or rumors you pick up). Other patrons can then pick up these quests, but before they go they will often ask for a drink for the road. Whichever drink you serve can alter how they go about completing the quest and whether they succeed.

It’s serviceable, but rarely challenging. Even with the addition of infusions, you rarely need to make more than the odd adjustment to a recipe. The entire time, I kept thinking back to a Honkai: Star Rail event called “Vignettes in a Cup,” which had a similar, but slightly more involved, drink-mixing minigame that served as a more substantial puzzle. That said, you could make a good argument that a more complex system would only slow this game down and keep players from getting to the real draw: the characters.

Tavern Talk features a robust gallery of rogues (or fighters, or clerics, or… detectives), and each feels like they could be someone’s player character. There’s a grumpy dwarf that has no time for worldbuilding and wants to get on with the game, the stuffy cleric that rigidly obeys their alignment, and a changeling with the most rancid vibes I’ve ever seen. They bounce off each other well too, and sometimes buddy-up with interesting results. The edgy rogue and the optimistic kitten were a fun pair, as was the anxious elf taking charge of the imposing warrior woman. Their interactions also helped sell me on the setting, which I otherwise found to be fairly typical high fantasy fluff. The more I saw of how they talked about the world at large, the more lived in it felt.

Patrons can even bring back decorations they find on quests to spruce up your bar, though you don’t get to place or customize them yourself. It’s also a nice touch that Tavern Talk lets you open up a logbook at any time to read a bio on all your regulars, including their class and alignment. That last part was actually interesting to observe in the dialogue, as there were more than a few times I found characters agreeing (or perhaps, aligning) on certain topics despite having vastly different personalities. I usually despise the Dungeons and Dragons alignment system as limited and limiting, but here it felt less obtrusive and more like a consistency.

My biggest criticism of Tavern Talk is just that it doesn’t really step too far outside that cozy comfort zone to re-evaluate things. To bring back a previous reference, VA-11 HALL-A (for all its problematic elements) used its ‘worms-eye view’ to show a different side of its cyberpunk setting, where you rarely have all the answers about whats going on and can do precious little when something happens to your friends and colleagues. It made the rapport you built with your regulars more meaningful, and in the end it felt like you had fostered a community that could mutually assist each other against the horrors of corporate dystopia. I never quite got that same feeling with Tavern Talk despite it hitting similar notes, or perhaps even because you have that little bit more agency in the story.

That’s not to say the game fails, in fact Tavern Talk accomplishes everything it sets out to do: it has coziness in spades and plenty of entertaining characters to encounter. If you enjoy a gentle ride and the odd tabletop RPG, Tavern Talk will feel like ordering a favorite drink from your regular watering hole. It won’t challenge you, but it might be just what you need to refresh after a long day.

Tavern Talk is immediately available on PC and Nintendo Switch.