Ale Abbey - Monastery Brewery Tycoon

I love just the idea of the game and love to play it to relax on the weekends. One thing that should be changed is adding more monastery levels but other wise perfection

The art, topic, and interactions are great, but the game is drug down by a slow gameplay loop, slow progression, and tons of micromanagement. While this works decently well during the early sections with the tutorial, progressing just to stage two took me lots of time - partially because you have to run it on double speed and babysit the pause button in order to not just be watching passively for the majority of the time. The brewing process is ok, but style discovery is weird and there's little experimentation outside of what the game asks you to do. I don't understand why brewing takes the same amount of time as fermentation, nor why you need to assign the brewer to fermentation at all. You're also limited, at least through the point where I was playing, from having multiple fermentation vessels in your brewery - which feels like the devs don't really understand the actual business lifecycle of beer. Add on other oddities like contracts asking you to take a loss unless you negotiate, the day/night cycle having no correlation with the actual passage of time, and the experience starts to really fray around the hem. It's a game that I would normally really enjoy, but the slow progression and the friction of micromanagement really drained the tankard of fun for me.

TL;DR: This game is nothing short of a little gem, and a fantastic game to sip a meditative ale with! 9/10 Art: 10/10 The pixel art matches the renaissance/late middle age style so perfectly it's actually a mystery how this has been achieved. The quality of the animations show that this was not done just to save on development time, but as a precise aesthetic. Absolutely gorgeous! Music: 8/10 Extremely enjoyable, never distracting - of course, there are no outright bangers but that is absolutely not an issue Mechanics: 9/10 It's not easy to create a game that catches the beauty and nuances in every style of beer while, at the same time, offers some level of economic management: one aspect is all but assured to overpower the others. While I'd love to see some QoL automations, without going into a Factorio level of obsession, the game is thoroughly enjoyable and relaxing, breaking the routine just often enough with orders, absurd requests from the count or some eminent religious figure.