Evergreen Tavern is hiding a dark and exciting secret

There are a lot of cozy business simulator games available to play these days, there seems to be something of a tidal wave of them on Steam and other platforms, and they all follow the same pattern. Stock, serve, decorate, stock some more, so on and so forth. Upcoming inn simulator, Evergreen Tavern, breaks this mold in a spectacularly unexpected way. 

Evergreen Tavern is a lot like other tavern simulator games out there. You suddenly inherit a medieval tavern, and now it’s your task to stock it with booze, serve the customers, and make it your own with some custom interior design. For the most part, it has the same gameplay loop as other games of the type, except for one very important thing: Evergreen Tavern has dungeons. 

But we might be getting ahead of ourselves here. 

Your very own tavern

Evergreen Tavern is set, as all good tavern sims are, in a medieval town where you suddenly find yourself in possession of an entirely empty tavern. You can buy wine and ale, stock the bar, and invite in the local townsfolk for a quick drink while you rake in the cash from their orders. The more you serve, the more you earn, the more you can buy to decorate the tavern. It’s a pretty straightforward gameplay loop. 

During my playthrough of the Evergreen Tavern demo, I discovered that there is no bar, at least not that I could find. Instead, I ended up painstakingly lining up barrels to form a makeshift bar so that I wasn’t running myself ragged trying to make sure everybody was served. Perhaps not the most aesthetically pleasing approach, but it did have a certain type of charm. 

As you serve more customers, you earn EXP that eventually allows you to level up. Leveling up unlocks new furniture and items to purchase, including extra types of drinks to gain more profits and grow the business.

If you want to boost your profits and lure in more customers, you’ll need some good pub grub to entice them. Before you can do that, though, you’ll need to start your very own kitchen garden so that you can grow your own ingredients. Seeds for crops are purchased from the merchant, and more will unlock as you reach higher levels. 

The hidden dungeons

Like I said, this is far from your regular medieval inn, but you wouldn’t know it if you didn’t fully inspect the building and all of its secrets. Down in the basement, where you may be tempted to store your kegs, you’ll see a bookshelf. Interacting with the bookshelf will cause it to slide to one side, revealing a hidden passageway. 

When I first found this passage, I thought, “Oh good, more storage!”, but that did not end up being the case. Instead, I put 50 Gold into a bowl and opened a portal to a new and terrifying dimension where ghosts and demons reside, and both of them want me dead. 

It’s hard to explain how the dungeons work, mainly because I’m not sure I understand it myself, but I can tell you that they are incredibly dark even with your lantern equipped, and there are a lot of jump scares to be found down there. 

As you progress through the dungeons, you’ll find piles of Gold and chests filled with items to place in your tavern, but you’ll also encounter various ghostly figures and shadow creatures that will then chase you around until they grab you, force you to look at them, and then shriek in your face until you’re dead. At least, that’s how my attempts went; yours might be more successful than mine. 

Still in development

Evergreen Tavern is an exciting new addition to the roster of tavern simulators, but it’s still in development and hasn’t even reached early access yet, so it’s surprising that we’ve even been blessed with a demo. However, the demo is substantial enough to give a good taster of all the main features of the game, and also enough to leave you wanting more. 

As developer Null Moon Games dives further with development, especially through early access with the help of feedback from players, Evergreen Tavern is likely to grow far beyond what it is now, and that’s perhaps even more exciting. Who knows where it will end up, but one thing is for sure: it’s definitely breaking the mold. 

If you want to try out the demo of Evergreen Tavern or wishlist the game to be notified when it enters early access, you can do both through Steam right now.