All posts tagged in Management
Sep 6, 2023
Tavern Keeper is a charming business simulation where you get to build and run your very own tavern! You’ll start out with the shell of a tavern out somewhere in the backwater remote area of the kingdom. It’s up to you to build a thriving business by meeting the demands of your customers. And as your profits increase, you can decorate the place, expand your tavern, add new dishes, hire staff, and more!
You’ll play your way through a single player campaign that takes place in a fantasy world full of unique characters. Encounter shape-shifters, skeletons, and more as each day brings you new surprises. Tavern Keeper is also full of simulated details for you to enjoy. You might have days where your staff is sick, or the personality traits of others present an obstacle to your day-to-day. There are dozens of other systems in the game that will keep you on your toes and keep the game play interesting. Don’t worry, though, you’ll have the tools to deal with everything that comes your way!
What’s really promising is the design mode in Tavern Keeper. If you love building and decorating, this might be the game for you. Design mode gives you the creative power to design the perfect tavern. Place a single candle on a table to create a cozy atmosphere, or even make an extravagant pile of pillows in the corner, perfect for relaxing in. You can even share your designs with others with the click of a button!
Coming Next Year
This fun little management sim is expected to release in quarter 3 of 2024! You can find Tavern Keeper on Steam, where you can Wishlist it.
Have you ever tried running your own b&b in the woods? Check out Bear and Breakfast!
- Jul 20, 2023
Humble Bundle is a great resource for the thrifty gamer with their bundle offers. Pick a bundle, then choose what you wish to pay. It’s a great way to grab a bunch of games for cheap. Right now, Humble Bundle has a Cozy Games bundle perfect for trying out a bunch of games you may have had your eye on! And these are all worthy of playing. They’re cute, cozy, and wholesome. Some feature powerful stories, while some are just perfect for kicking back and relaxing with.
This offer ends in 20 days, so take your time to decide, but don’t let it pass by!
Cat Cafe Manager
Cat Cafe Manager has you taking over your grandmother’s derelict cafe in the sleepy town of Caterwaul Way. Restore the cafe, renovate it, and decorate it as you wish, turning it into an inviting home for the plethora of cats that call Caterwaul Way home. Hire employees to help manage the cafe, and explore the village to befriend the inhabitants and learn new recipes.
Witchy Life Story
In Witchy Life Story you’re the youngest member of the magical von Teasel family, but you’re not exactly their pride and joy. In fact, you have one more chance to prove yourself or your witch training is over. So, you arrive in the village of Flora to try and save their harvest festival. You have two weeks to make it a success. So, gather herbs, brew potions, get to know the townspeople, and even cast some spells. Maybe cause a little chaos, even.
Here Comes Niko
Play as the adorable Niko, who’s just become a professional friend for Tadpole Inc. in Here Comes Niko! You’ll explore different scenic islands while making friends with people you come across. Complete requests for them by catching fish and bugs, solving puzzles, and even just listening to them. If you’re lucky, they’ll pay you and you can then invest in a train system to get to new islands!
Garden Story
Welcome to the Grove! You’re its new guardian, and it’s your duty to rebuild the village and uncover the story of its past. Garden Story is a chill wholesome game where you’ll complete quests to defend against encroaching Rot, gather resources, restore, and improve the town. There’s even a way to turn off combat to make it even cozier to play!
Lemon Cake
Lemon Cake is an adorable little game about restoring a run-down, haunted bakery. Grow fruit and care for animals, who provide ingredients for your bakery. Repair, furnish, and decorate every room to create an inviting little business. Mix and bake up some fantastic recipes, and maybe even convince the ghost to help you out!
Alba: A Wildlife Adventure
Join Alba as she visits her grandparents on a once-beautiful Mediterranean island in Alba: A Wildlife Adventure. She’s ready to explore the island with her friend Ines, but when she sees an animal in trouble, she realizes she needs to help it. As Alba, you’ll start a whole campaign to clean up the island! Convince the townspeople to help out and gather volunteers to restore the island and help the wildlife.
A Short Hike
A Short Hike is about exactly that, hiking! Spend time in the peaceful mountainside of Hawk Peak Park simply exploring. Hike the marked trails or explore the wild back country. Climb some rocky cliffs. Glide over lush landscapes. Take your time to absorb the beautiful surroundings and meet other hikers. Perhaps you can help each other out. Even discover some treasures!
Assemble With Care
Assemble with Care features a meaningful, evocative story line about Maria, a globe-trotting antique restorer as she arrives in Bellariva. She wants to help the inhabitants fix their personal items, but discovers it’s their personal lives that are starting to fracture. It’s harder to fix those, but she’s determined to help. You’ll solve puzzles by fixing items brought to her, meet the townsfolk, and tune into a lovely soundtrack inspired by the 80s.
65% off Coupon for Haven Park
Unfortunately, Haven Park isn’t included in this bundle, just a lovely 65% off coupon! It’s a great discount for such a cute game where you play as Flint, who has just taken over his grandmother’s beloved park. He wants to make it a park campers will love, so it’s up to you to help him out. Fulfill each camper’s wishes and build whatever their hearts desire. Happy campers will attract more business, which means more quirky characters for you to talk to and enjoy!
Like lists? Want more game recommendations? Check out 5 of My Favorite Cozy Steam Next Fest Demos!
- Jul 12, 2023
Farm Keeper is an adorable tile-based farming game with nostalgic pixel graphics. It’s your job to survive when rent comes due. You need to strategically build your farm to maximize profits. Learn how each tile type interacts with each other, then carefully plan your farm’s layout. Each new tile offers the chance to not only change your strategy, but to expand your farm. Just be careful as tile choices are random. You can complete challenges and unlock secret tiles as you play.
Plant and cultivate crops, care for livestock, and profit!
You can find Farm Keeper on Steam! Also checkout APICO, a sweet little beekeeping management sim.
- Feb 9, 2023
Raise and Breed Bees
While we’re on the subject of honey and beekeeping this week (check out Honeymancer if you haven’t), let’s take a look at APICO! Leave your boring city job and return to Port APICO, where you grew up, and return to your beekeeping roots. This cute pixel graphic game is a laid-back beekeeping simulation with breeding, some exploration, and you’ll even learn how to conserve bees.
The APICO islands feature a set of lush, beautiful environments for you to explore. Each biome has its oven breed of bees for you to discover. Gather resources to use in your studies or crafting. Make and sell Apicola (honey) and other beekeeping items you will discover. Play fun beekeeping minigames, without the stings! More importantly, breed different cross breeds of bees and discover 30 new species to help repopulate the APICO islands with. Plus, uncover the secrets of the islands while you explore.
APICO supports up to four players in online co-op, so grab a friend or two and get to beekeeping together! And if you run out of game content, the developers suggest modding the game, though it seems they’re still adding updates to the game. January 30th, 2023 saw the addition of butterflies! Either way, it sounds like APICO can be as simple or as versatile as you’d like to make it.
Available Now!
APICO is available now on pretty much all platforms. You can find it on Steam, Itch.io, the Humble Bundle store, Epic Games, Utomik, Nintendo Switch, and Playstation! You can also try out the demo on Steam.
You can also check out Bee Simulator for more bee fun.
- Sep 18, 2019
I talked about Food Fantasy earlier and how it’s available now for iOS and Android devices therefore I decided to try the free app for myself. Of course a game about unique characters inspired by foods would have me very interested! Food Fantasy is an RPG adventure management game where you have to manage and design your own restaurant, develop new recipes and gather the ingredients, as well as battling your way through the main story-line and side quests. There is so much to do in this game without ever having to wait long periods of time or having to spend real-life currency to advance. I can’t possibly cover all of the details today so I’d like to point out some basics and my favorite characters so far!
Food Souls are exactly what their name implies; souls come to being from food. They have magical abilities that humans have lost over the years and therefore can help us fight against the Fallen Angels that are consuming everything within the world. You have to form contracts with them in order for them to serve you as their Master Attendant and can be quite helpful maintaining a restaurant. Since it happens to be National Cheeseburger Day today (September 18th, 2019), I wanted to point out this awesome Food Soul literally named Hamburger. I haven’t managed to obtain him yet, but perhaps today is the day!
Food Management Section
In your new restaurant you will be able to hire one Head Chef, and two assistant Staff members, Food Souls, that can help you out with profits. You’ll want to make sure that those particular Food Souls have Restaurant Skills and not just Combat Skills. Your Food Souls can only last so long, although some bonuses can prolong this, and will need to be swapped out. When their Freshness is at 0, you can stick them in the fridge! The Ice Arena will hold up to 3 Food Souls for free and will gain back their Freshness over a small period of time. If you can’t wait, use some items to speed up the process. In the Research menu, you’ll be creating new recipes or improving the ones you already have, as well as crafting said items mentioned above.
You can only uncover new recipes of your area of choice by trying different food combinations. I recommended using a guide for later on, only because the English translation in this and the infrequent use of the ‘space bar’, make it almost impossible to decipher the hints of locked recipes. If you’re missing ingredients, click on the one you want and it will guide you to the level where you can obtain more. Wait, did I just see a recipe for Stir-Fried Potatoes!?
Battling with your Food Souls
Every day you’ll come across Daily Goals, Story Missions (main story and side-quests), Trials, etc in order to train your Food Souls and level up. You as the Master Attendant also need to gain levels by accomplishing these tasks in order for your Food Souls to be able to advance, Meaning, you can’t keep fighting if you’ve maxed them out. Your character can even help your Food Souls by learning some abilities via your Talents.
Your companions can go up in level, but also Star Rank when they are ready to Ascend. When you have enough items to Summon a new Food Soul at random, you can either unlock a new character, or get Shards toward one you already have that can be used to Ascend them. Then, by using in-game money, you can also level up your Food Souls’ skills to do more damage or support. It’s a lot to take in at first so I won’t get into it right now.
Combat in this isn’t too stressful as your characters will automatically do their basic attacks. When their energy bar fills, you can use their special attacks, which usually requires you to have characters that support each other (links). You can find out which characters to place together in your team by reading their skills. UR, then SR Rarity Food Souls, are the rarest characters you can obtain and therefore the most powerful. The game won’t tell you this so it takes some digging. Also, when deciding a team, make sure your Captain is the one you want because they start at 50% energy which can give you a huge advantage. Other than that, you’ll be spending a lot of time tapping on the screen at the right time.
Design and Favorite Characters
I have thoroughly enjoyed “collecting” Food Souls and staring in amazement at their designs in relation to their names. Not only do you get beautiful portraits of each character, but you can also see them in their “chibi” forms which is absolutely adorable! Below are some screenshots of characters I find the most amusing out of the ones I have unlocked. May I present Peeking Duck: a character that battles with several miniature ducks!
I can’t help but feel a kinship to these characters as I have gone through my own journey of becoming more than just food. This game is also very addictive and easy to play while watching TV if you so choose. Ready to try it out for yourselves? You can go here for iOS and here for Android!
- Aug 24, 2019
Thanks to IGN’s live-streaming of Gamescom 2019 all week long, we have 15 minutes of gameplay footage to show you of the “cozy management game about dying” by developer Thunder Lotus Games; Spiritfarer. Today, Saturday, August 24th 2019, is the last day for Gamescom. El Hijo, Genesis Noir, Minute of Islands, Mosaic, and Unheard were nominated for Gamescom “Indie Award” by IGN here. El Hijo, a western stealth game we covered during E3 2019, was the winner! The winners of the expert jury’s decision announced during Opening Night Live can be found here.
Below in the video for Spiritfarer you play as the ferrymaster Stella accompanied by her feline furry friend Daffodil. We get to see a total of three spirit characters that request that their final wishes be fulfilled before they are ready to move on. In order to make them comfortable, you add little tiny homes via the Shipyard. You get to place these homes, according to that particular spirit’s needs, wherever you want on your boat. Example, the snake-like spirit, Summer, asks for a home with “a nice meditation room, with plants, and natural materials”. You advance the game by completing quests as Spirit Requests that consists of getting certain items or exploring new islands. One such island is Hummingberg Village. Also, we find it important to note that you can hug any of your spirit friends because it’s quite precious.
Spiritfarer will be releasing on Steam, Xbox One, PS4, and the Nintendo Switch sometime in 2020. If you enjoyed watching this gameplay footage from Gamescom 2019, check out our articles here: Link’s Awakening Remake Footage at Gamescom and Two Point Hospital Reveals Close Encounters DLC.
- Aug 15, 2019
Hundred Days is an upcoming simulation game with a page already on Steam. To us it seems like a cross between a farming game and a business-tycoon or money-management game, like Chocolatier. You arrange your field and grow crops of different types of grapes to harvest them in different seasons.
But in addition to that, you also choose the recipe for your wines. It’s not all about the type of grape. The grape’s growing conditions affect its quality and attributes. Even the type of yeast you use to ferment the grapes will have an impact on the wine’s final quality. If you want to make the big bucks in Hundred Days, you’re going to have to grow the best grapes and make the best wine.
You’re even going to have to manage the soil’s PH levels. PH levels are a measure of how acidic or alkaline your soil is, and would have an effect on your grapes’ final flavour. When you harvest will also affect their attributes. With such a level of realism, we think this indie developer, Broken Arms Games, must have a real passion for vineyards and winemaking! We look forward to becoming digital oenophiles, too, once Hundred Days releases.
Key Features
- Simulative and realistic approach suitable for both beginners and more experienced players
- The ability to cultivate different types of vine
- Analyze the soil and choose the grape variety that best suits those characteristics
- Organize work in the vineyard such as pruning or chipping
- Protect your vines through specific treatments depending on the type of disease
- Check the state of ripeness of the grapes and decide when to harvest
- Follow the winemaking processes and enhance the characteristics of your wine
- Select the yeasts and bacteria used during fermentation
- Decide how and which of your wines age with aging
- Customize your bottles by choosing their shape, color and other aesthetic characteristics
- Create your sales network and adapt the characteristics of your product to the type of customer
- Manage marketing and social activities to increase the reputation of your company
Broken Arms Games uses the tagline “A game of choice, nostalgia, and winemaking.” We’re intrigued by where ‘nostalgia’ comes into play! We also like that every choice you make in the game has an influence on its outcome. We’re looking forward to discovering and growing every type of grape and figuring out every last type of wine we can squeeze out of them!
Watch the video here, or go directly to the official site for even more info. We hope Hundred Days will be releasing soon, because we’re ready to dive into those lovely vineyards!
If you like money-management or tycoon-style games, check out Planet Zoo, due for release in early November. Or if it’s the farming aspect of Hundred Days that appeals to you, then have a look at our list of farming games on console.
- Jul 3, 2019
Rolling Hills is a simulation game about owning your very own sushi restaurant, created by indie developer Catch & Release. To get all of the updates on this game you can follow the developers on Twitter here and their Discord channel here. You can also see below on everything we know so far with tons of new screenshots!
Here are some of the bigger changes coming to Rolling Hills this month:
- Conveyor belt sushi! We’ve finally come up with a fun way to learn what each customer likes while still letting you flex your creativity as a sushi chef.
- Procedurally generated customers, therefore a sci-fi convention might bring a dozen different robots to your restaurant instead of just the one.
- Occasional special orders that you can fulfill for big bonuses.
- Plates that need to be collected and washed for a more realistic restaurant sim vibe.
- Super cute receipts at checkout and lots of ways to reward different play styles (rewards for quality, for variety, for speed, etc.)!
Once all of these changes have been implemented, the developers plan on working on their long-term goals; the storyline, lots of recipes and ingredients to discover, and new people to meet! By people we mean adorably weird humans and talking animals.
Feast Your Eyes on This!
Below are a few animations from the prototype of the game to tie us over until we can get our hands on it for Steam and the PlayStation Store. As you can see, we have been shown three customers: a chicken wanting our recommendations, a caveman that’s free at last, and a wizard making ‘punny’ jokes. We also get to take a look at the overall aesthetics of the restaurant so far and what seems to be the way we can fill our displays with sushi. Moreover, that making sushi will require you use your skills at pressing buttons just at the right time.
Want more games with sushi in them? Check out our most recent article on The Sushi Spinnery, and own another restaurant. Because sushi is yummy.
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