When an email for Dragon Song Tavern: Cozy & Adventurous landed in my inbox, the first thing I did was send it to CGM’s Dayna Eileen with the subject line: “Look how cute!” My love of sim games is pretty well known, and I’m always excited to play a game where restaurant management is involved, so this seemed like a slam dunk. But as I’ve often said, when delving into the Indie scene, you can find gems, or you can find stones.
Dragon Song Tavern: Cozy & Adventurous initially looked to me like a little more of what I wanted out of Cuisineer’s restaurant management, but the longer I played it, the faster I wanted to stop. It’s a game with a fair number of good ideas, but it is constantly marred by poor execution and a genuine lack of polish.
The story begins in Dragon Song Tavern: Cozy & Adventurous when the player and their sibling (brother or sister, depending on which gender you choose) arrive at a small island tavern, which the player’s sibling announces they purchased on the cheap. Inside, they find a small dragon named Luca who helps them get set up and begin the process of turning the abandoned building into a thriving tavern.
It’s as simple a story as that, but there are a few little twists and turns as a prospective buyer wants to purchase the building for secretive reasons and is seemingly plotting against the player in an attempt to force control away from them. It’s a simple enough story that, despite a somewhat amateurish delivery, does have some interesting and even mature ideas behind it.
Where Dragon Song Tavern: Cozy & Adventurous both excels and suffers, though, is in its gameplay. Its biggest issue is that it’s doing way too many things, and none of them particularly well. When you consider a game like Cuisineer, it splits its gameplay into two sections—combat and restaurant. It gives each one a solid amount of depth without overwhelming the player. Dragon Song Tavern: Cozy & Adventurous, by contrast, has farming elements, restaurant management, turn-based RPG combat and character management, and a pet system, and no one idea is all that captivating.
The farming is bog-standard and downplayed so much that almost from the start, the game tells you to go to the magic store to buy wands that will trivialize it. The turn-based combat is pretty unremarkable, although somewhat more complex than your average turn-based RPG, but it doesn’t even teach players its mechanics. It’s got some unique ideas, like attacks being tied to action points, but it’s fairly unremarkable.
The restaurant management has some ideas I actually wanted from Cuisineer, like the ability to set a menu every night, but the way you both prep food and learn new recipes leaves a lot to be desired. Players can make both food and drinks through two basic timing minigames. For drinks, players need to land a bar in a specific area to yield higher-quality drinks. For food, players need to hold down a button until a little flame reaches a specific area to best prep the food.
“Where Dragon Song Tavern: Cozy & Adventurous both excels and suffers, though, is in its gameplay.”
And while it’s not exactly the worst thing imaginable, I had hoped a game about running a tavern would’ve had some more involving minigames for the process of preparing food. But the most baffling part is how you “research” recipes. Basically, players are given a small hint about what goes into certain dishes and need to attempt to logic out what goes into making the dish. If you get it wrong, you’ll end up with wasted materials and a worthless dish.
And while Dragon Song Tavern: Cozy & Adventurous will save if you get one of the needed ingredients correct, it just feels like such a needlessly obtuse way to research new recipes. It could’ve taken a page from Cuisineer’s book and just let players purchase new recipes, or given them stat points to invest in R&D.
And it’s not like the materials needed for recipes are easy to come by, which leads to another one of the double-edged swords of Dragon Song Tavern: Cozy & Adventurous. The game actually does something I like, having individual “makers” for milling flour, curing meats, crafting milk into products like milk and cheese and a wine cellar for crafting alcohol.
Despite just being Makers at the end of the day, I liked how they had individual themes and added to the sense of running a restaurant. However, all of these things take AGES to produce, and the game has a bizarre in-game clock where every day equals a full hour of real time. Not only that, especially at the start of the game, you’re only given two slots to produce ingredients, so not only are you barred by extreme wait times, but your options as so limited.
“Despite just being Makers at the end of the day, I liked how they had individual themes and added to the sense of running a restaurant.”
However, players can buy an item called “Sand of Time,” which allows them to speed up production, the same way premium currency would in a mobile game, which just felt incredibly bizarre to me from a design perspective. I just couldn’t understand why a game where creating food and managing a tavern is the central gameplay mechanic would put such harsh restrictions on players.
And even when you’re running the tavern and serving guests, there are weird limits that don’t make any sense. This may be a small thing that only bugs me—as someone who once worked in a restaurant—but players are unable to put both food and drinks on a platter. While they can put multiples of a single type in order to serve several guests, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why you can mix food and drink.
Visually, Dragon Song Tavern: Cozy & Adventurous is incredibly amateur. There’s very little in the way of 3D objects in this game—the majority of environmental objects and even buildings are static PNGs. Character animations are choppy and sometimes basic, like when you watch a customer eat soup with a fork and knife, like they’re cutting a steak. Enemies in the adventure areas just stand around motionless, initiating a battle once you get close to them, and it’s all very unimpressive.
Audio is equally bizarre. Almost none of the music feels like it suits its intended setting. The standard island theme is decent, but once you get into your tavern, it plays a really obnoxious 15-second loop of what feels like what you would get if you asked AI to generate a generic fantasy tavern theme. Once service starts, the music gets really ethereal and kind of morose, with the stock sound of a drink being poured coming in every few seconds like it was meant to be on a beat but just wasn’t.
The town theme is equally dour and overly serious, feeling more like the music that would accompany the “all is lost moment” in a fantasy RPG than something that is supposed to capture the fun and energy of a farming sim’s market square. Battle music is also incredibly low-key and makes fights just feel really boring. None of it is particularly bad, but it’s all so ill-suited to the game this is trying to be.
There’s a lot I really want to like about Dragon Song Tavern: Cozy & Adventurous, but even after a year-long stint in Early Access, the game feels like it still needs so much work to be ready for official release. I think if you’re a fan of restaurant sims, there are some things to enjoy here, but coming off of something like Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar, this just feels like a giant step backwards.
