Creating alcohol from scratch and starting a business isn’t easy. Fortunately, working within a specialized abbey gives you the resources you need. Construct a working brewery and experiment with different alcohol brews by combining ingredients together. Continue refining your product to ensure you can outsell the competition. Upgrade the abbey and expand your business to other towns to earn more money.
Ale Abbey is a management simulation game from Hammer & Ravens where you manage the titular location to make a profitable business. Your product is a variety of alcoholic beverages, though you can’t make many at first. As your experience and ingredient repertoire grow, you create more advanced beverages that appeal to different tastes. This allows you to sell your products to a wider audience and earn more money.
Working in Ale Abbey is simple thanks to a tutorial that walks you through the basics. Finishing the tutorial lets you get more ingredients and experiment with different brews. There isn’t much opportunity to expand your business and experimentation has its limits. If you want a taste of medieval brewing, Ale Abbey does a good job at getting your feet wet. It doesn’t make big changes to the simulator experience but it’s worth keeping an eye on.
Brewing beverages is a complex affair with different variables to manipulate. You can craft a new recipe or improve an existing recipe. Choose your beverage ingredients and adjust various factors to achieve the desired taste. Name your creation and it’s ready for sale. Alternatively, you can also keep the beverage for your workers to drink and raise morale. Allowing you to decide what you do with beer helps deal with potential failures while letting you learn from mistakes.
You can expand and improve the abbey with new rooms and furniture. As you start creating more beverages and grow your team, you need more rooms and furniture. It’s important to decorate your rooms since your workers live inside and need some satisfaction. If you neglect decorating your base, your workers won’t be motivated to work. It’s a good way to encourage you to customize the abbey and make it your own.
Currently there isn’t much to do other than constantly create drinks, pursue the existing research, and find new ingredients. If you enjoy the idea of experimenting with new recipes and keeping your abbey afloat, there’s lots to do. Gameplay feels repetitive after a while because there isn’t a strict goal other than earning money. It’s not difficult to earn a decent profit even with your starting recipes, making drink development optional.
The tutorial also ends abruptly as if the training wheels were suddenly removed. While that isn’t inherently bad, it does leave you wondering if there is more. Sometimes you aren’t allowed to experiment while the tutorial is running. Not knowing when it ends makes you wonder if you are ready and you don’t learn about building a storage room that is vital for market access, compounding the uncertainty.
Ale Abbey is definitely a game to watch if you want a simulator game based around alcohol. The foundations are solid and there’s a goal to work towards after the tutorial ends. You can’t do much other than earn money and create new drinks, but it’s still a good experience. Whatever the future has in store for Ale Abbey should be interesting if there’s room for a campaign or some challenges. Until then, satisfy yourself with earning money and creating drinks.
