Bad Beer

In this compact single-puzzle parser game, the PC has been asked by the proprietor of their local pub to figure out what’s souring all his beer. It soon becomes clear that the pub is haunted, and the PC finds themself yanked back in time to try to prevent the ghost’s untimely death.

The game is a little sparse (in the sense that there’s not much you can do besides the things you need to do, although there are a few optional secrets to find), but it’s charming and highly polished, with a strong sense of place and some entertaining fake beer names. The central puzzle took me a few tries to get, but I always felt like I had an idea of what to try next. I also really appreciated the option to skip the opening and jump straight to the “past” segment, which made retries less of a pain.

The opening segment requires you to hit a certain number of triggers related to experiencing ghostly activity in order to advance the plot, and I did get hung up a little at that stage, mostly because I felt like I’d already experienced enough ghostly activity to get that that was what was going on, so it wasn’t totally clear to me that I needed to look for more. Other than that, though, my experience playing Bad Beer was smooth, fun, and quick (it took me about 20 minutes to complete, including the two retries of the past segment).