Review - Ale Abbey

L. Sahara McGirt
42 minutes ago
5 min read

Developer: Hammer & Ravens

Publisher: Shiro Unlimited

Available on: PC (Steam)

I won't lie, I enjoy a brewery-type game. Whether it's managing my own modern-day brewpub in Brewpub Simulator or keeping the candles lit in Travellers Rest. There's just something about spending time brewing up an ale, wine, or other such joyful concoction and then selling it for profit that I find deeply satisfying.

So of course, when a game like Ale Abbey comes across my inbox, I just have to try it out and see how it compares, right?

Your Maltiness

Ale Abbey has a pretty simple premise: run a monastery, brew holy ales, and build your abbey! The game is filled with goals and objectives that have to do with expanding your monastery and brewing new recipes, and thus gives plenty to do and work toward. The gameplay loop overall is satisfying. Hire fermentines to research and unlock new furniture and skills, have them create new recipes, and they brew your ales to sell to towns. The complexity of the game is in managing these drunken heathens and trying to turn a profit while doing so.

It's a lot more difficult than one may think. Turns out brewing ales is an expensive endeavor. On top of that, managing fermentines requires ensuring they have a comfortable place to sleep, decorating the monastery, feeding them, oh, and brewing some extra ale for them to quench their thirst and keep them happy.

That's right, the fermentines spend most of their time in a state of inebriation. Often, they will even simply pass out in the middle of brewing, adding to the time it takes to brew up an ale. It's fun to watch, but it can bring you to the brink when you're trying to meet a deadline and are overwhelmed by orders.

Watch Those Coins!

The game is chock-full of challenge. There's bandits who will rob your shipments of brews unless you pay them off in coin or ale. The time crunches really only happen if you take on too many orders at once, but when they happen, they can really screw you, especially if an ale being brewed gets infected. I had a point in the game where ale after ale got infected, and I just could not meet the deadline to deliver. It was a nightmare run of bad luck. Every rebrew coat me, and I ended up going back to a previous save and restarting.

The demands of the church, edicts, challenges Ale Abbey offers, and competitions can help you a lot by lowering ingredient prices and upping the prices on certain brews if you can complete or win them. If you lose, tho, prepare for pain. I learned how bad things can get when brew after brew goes bad, and I had to sell brews at a lower cost, and failed orders caused me to have a domino effect of problems. I couldn't even keep the bandits happy at one point, and they robbed so much of my deliveries that it just got terrible, and I couldn't get back on my feet.

However, when you do win and fulfill orders well, everything goes great. Just stay above water and you'll be fine. Keep an eye on that budget, and it's almost a breeze. Sell what will turn the highest profit at the lowest cost, of course. The trick I learned is to develop an easy, cheap recipe that has a high profit turnover and keep selling that while working on other recipes and fulfilling orders, and completing challenges.

It's a challenging but almost forgiving gameplay loop, and if you're willing to put in the work, it can be really satisfying and fun. However, I do think some things could be rebalanced.

In Beer, We Trust

While I enjoyed the game's challenges, I did not enjoy the moments when failure after failure compounded into a nightmare run that inevitably led to me save-scumming my way out of it. There's the option to take a loan, which helps a lot in a pinch, but if you start to fail with the loan taken out, Ale Abbey continues to be a nightmare. The game is forgiving in that it does not ever completely fail players when they start failing too badly, but there does come a point where it seems like there is no way out, and there's really no choice but to restart from a previous save or start a whole new game.

I'm not sure how to fix that, but I do think Ale Abbey could use a bit of tweaking to keep folks from rage-quitting. It can be frustrating, fast. I also think the research skill could use rebalancing. The game caps research points at 400, and my researchers reached that quickly. So when I got stuck in a loop as I attempted to upgrade my monastery to a level II build, I had a bunch of fermentines I had to retire as they had nothing to do.

Great Pixelated Aesthetics

Overall, Ale Abbey is a great-looking game. I like the pixelated art style. It's pleasing and suits the game's material. In a way, it contributes to the ye olde style aesthetic it has going for it. The game sounds the way one might expect it to.

However, I do have one major gripe: The pixelated font is tiny. Too tiny. I'll grant that it aids the aesthetic and makes a lot of sense to use. However, there are ways to set up a pixelated font so that the lettering is bigger/thicker/easier to see. That just does not exist in Ale Abbey. Options to change the text include scalable interfaces, which scale up the text in a different font, but I found another issue with that is that, depending on your screen size, it can turn blurry. At which point, why even bother?

I wear glasses, and they're near perfect with my vision when in use, but the way the font in Ale Abbey was too tiny had me wondering until I showed other people, and they also said the same thing.

Plenty to Continue Improving

Overall, I think Ale Abbey is a great management game with a challenging gameplay loop, and I think it could be quite addictive for those who enjoy games like it. Especially those who enjoy a challenge and min-maxing their management games. However, some of the visual issues could use some work, and it really does need some rebalancing to make it a truly excellent game. So with all that said: