I'll serve my Blood Bar Tycoon customers when I'm through dumping exsanguinated bodies down the sewer
Two points in the neck
It’s an oddly Halloweeny summer week for games, this one. Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s October 31st release date leaked earlier, Steam have put together a Summer Fright Night bundle featuring RPS fave Hauntii, and I’ve got a strange urge to gorge on Haribo and mini Double Deckers until blood comes out of my eyeballs. What a perfect time, then, to dive into the alpha demo for vampire management game Blood Bar Tycoon, especially since Two Point seem to be resting on their laurels a bit too comfortably for my liking.
The idea here is you build a swanky bar serving claret cosmopolitans, ichor-ish coffees and uh, viscera vampiros to your undead clientele. But (with the sorta exception of the crimson-sapped Dracaena cinnabari) blood doesn’t grow on trees, so you’ll also be moonlighting as a human-nabber. You’ll research a slew of “whacky contraptions” to extract their blood, which I greatly enjoy, because “zany exsanguination” is a real winner of a feature. You can’t frivolously phlebotomise with impunity, however - you’ll also want to be on the lookout for vampire hunters aka the fun police.
The demo starts off innocently enough. I have my minion Raphael (a bountiful font of ‘it’s a living!’ type gags) clean up an old mattress, then place down a table, chairs, and a beer bump. The game has me fiddle with his work schedule a bit so he’ll clean and serve drinks without being prompted, then I open the bar. He dutifully serves a beardy chap named Cyrus a cold beer and takes his money, at which point the game directs me to have Raphael drain the blood from his neck. This is how you keep your workers fed. Cyrus collapses to the floor, and reliable Raph zips up his corpse in a body bag, then dumps him in the sewers. This, I’m informed, is where the term ‘manhole’ comes from.
Throughout this, there’s lots of lovely detailed animations, like Raphael sliding the body bag down the manhole with his foot. The natural next step after murder and corpse disposal is, of course, interior decoration, so I set about increasing my bar’s prestige level. A table here, a dartboard there, an extra corpse hole in the back, you know how it goes. Soon, more walking lunchboxes with full wallets enter the bar, and I’m back to serving drinks. I take this opportunity to check out Raphael’s info panel, where I notice he’s got a ‘wipe memory’ ability to use on ‘witnesses’, which I assume is something you’ll want to employ to avoid those vampire hunters.
Next, I work on attracting an actual vampire to the bar, which I do by filling fridges with a tasty stock of blood bags. Vladimir eventually shows up, impressed enough with me opening the blood bar in this part of town to give me a nice chunk of investment capital. A capitalist vampire, eh? I guess I’m now enthralled to an insatiably hungry parasitic leech. Who’s also a vampire! Ayyyy! Time to get started on the construction, then…
I can see myself spending a fair bit more time with Blood Bar Tycoon. I’d initially feared it was going to rely on an aesthetic while being a bit flat to actually play, which I’ve noticed happen with a few strategy and management subgenres. But I think there’s some real heart in this one, alongside a few clever ideas that fit snugly within an already comfortable framing. You can find the free Alpha on Steam here. Happy summerween!