Crossroads of Flesh

"Is that squire on the fire?"

"Mercy no, sir, look closer, you'll notice it's grocer"

"Looks thicker, more like vicar"

"No, it has to be grocer - it's green"

 

A Little Priest (Sweeney Todd)

 

(or, alternately, try The Cathedral of Flesh's theme; Redemption, for all its flaws, featured some of the most inspired game music ever recorded)

 

 

I speculated at one point on how a fantasy RPG inkeeper game should play, and marked a few random titles I found on that theme. Two of those, Travellers Rest and Fortune's Tavern, look like RPGMaker fare, and I'd rather not pay good money for freakin' chibis. Tavern Keeper might've vaporized? I eventually caved in and gave Crossroads Inn a try just to see the concept in execution. It's not very executive.

 

Not pictured: lists upon lists of redundant recipes.

Opting for campaign mode first, I quit two minutes into the opening cinematic when the narration headed for some manner of painfully trite chosen one / secret orphaned prince setup. Why? When for once you're working with a theme so apt to show a commoner's rise to greatness in the absence of cosmic favor... WHY?!? why why cling to the same perfunctory star-crossrailroaded specialness as 95% of fantasy fiction?!

Anyway, swapping to the more freeform game mode, I was immediately struck by how unfinished Crossroads Inn looks even four years and a couple of DLCs after release, and even by the standards of my generally low-budget RPG/Strategy collection.

why one box but not the other...?

If you've played games with a managerial side you'll be familiar with the resource stockpiling/recombination paired with Sims-inspired customer/employee mood management, but here both sides appear truncated from their design aspirations, with features like employee mood/loyalty or resource decay stripped of their effects to save balancing. I eventually quit due to the time-honored algorithmic foible of pathfinding (and the unrestricted drag-drop tool you're given to move NPCs should tell you just how often they get stuck) but the depths of Crossroads Inn's amateurishness show in rando' crap like lack of feedback on whether your orders are queued, neglecting to word-wrap a text box, or autosave never replacing old saves, accumulating hundreds of daily files.

To compensate for all these lacks, its developers leaned hard on expanding your trade network on the overland map. At some point they seem to have decided to give up on actual gameplay and just copypasta the nearest cookbook, making you gradually unlock dozens, scores and hundreds of recipes for which to stockpile more and more redundant ingredients. Ditto for furniture. While some such breadth in a core feature is expected (see Dwarf Fortress' livestock) even the fifteen types of customers don't justify the sheer repetition of yet another omelette and yet another soup. Even the developers themselves obviously had no idea what to do with them all. "It's a chair, don't know what more to tell you" sounds cute the first time. Not so much the fiftieth.

 

Sinking all their work-hours into a heavily scripted campaign instead of addressing basic functionality makes Crossroads Inn overpriced even at 80% off.

But enough about its failures, let's segue to what was never attempted. Despite a smatter of fantasy gimmicks like griffin eggs and alchemy, the game's creators opted for more of a vaguely Dumas-flavored inn of intrigue, never quite meshing with the managerial simulation precept and casting the choice of setting in doubt. In my original post linked at the start I'd said "Fantasy tavern management shouldn't be about cheerfully serving drinks. Your struggle to stay in business should center on your innkeeper's role as middle-man to the forces out to destroy the world, a conniving tool and accessory, a racketeer, a money-launderer, an accomplice, an enabler to the universe's gutterspawn and all the grandstanding, self-righteous loose cannons who stand in soi-disant opposition to "evil" forces." And while I stand by playing up the destructive nature of adventurers and fantasy inns' role as drama magnets, there might be a useful link here to my declaration that I wanna be a Tzimisce.

Why not pair the fleshcrafting of a villainous lair with a greater context for acquiring more flesh to craft? Fantasy races tend to be carnivorous anyway, and if a poor wing-sore griffin on above the road would pay good money for a haunch of hobbit... and hobbit-hide makes such lovely upholstery... well, who are you to deny it in here? In that context, the inn itself would be... bait.

 

Crossroads Inn's obsession with gathering recipes from the three corners of the world got me thinking I'm also gathering connoisseurs from said corners, and it's a damn shame to let that culinary variety go to waste. By all means advertise horse steaks to lure in all those Dothraki nomads, to lure in those independently wealthy dragons with a taste for Dothraki. And what giant doesn't love a good Jack'n'beans? Maybe stock up on honeydew for a fairy brunch, and some fairy popsicles for the orc table's dessert tray? Why not? You'll keep players' attention more readily by serving cousins than cuisine.

And who better to put the... leftovers... to good use than a tzimisce inkeeper, faultlessly polite and mannered and always on the lookout for more art supplies? As the inn prospers aboveground, so does its hidden counterpart below, sinew by sclera.

Look, not to get too lycanthropic here, but parental watchdog groups are gonna keep bitching about video games' corrupting influence anyway. Give 'em something to cry about. Beats counting the pixelated mugs of lager any day.