The Copper Tavern

All good game reviewing is subjective, in my view, but sometimes that gets tricky because the subjective experience of playing a game can wind up having very little to do with the game itself. Case in point: The Copper Tavern. An actual review of this game would contextualize it as a small PunyInform fantasy game, with thin but largely-competent execution, one and a half simple puzzles (plus another simple optional one), and a not-unappealing but juvenile sense of humor, and then maybe provide some personal color on how much the reviewer enjoyed, or didn’t, all that stuff, perhaps wrapping up with some craft pointers for what’s probably a first-time author and maybe making a wry-joke about the see-through safe (“You can see a heavy duty safe (which is closed and contains an eviction notice) here.”)

Yeah, that’s not what playing Copper Tavern was like for me.

I mean on a certain level it was, I experienced all those things and had all those thoughts. But the whole time I was distracted. See, only a day or two ago I played Gambler’s Quest, which is a small PunyInform fantasy game, with largely-competent etc. etc. etc., and I couldn’t help notice that there are an overwhelming number of similarities between these games, even beyond the obvious. They’re both attributed to authors going by just their first (fairly generic) names, with no email or other contact info listed. Per their serial numbers, they were finalized on consecutive days, and their Comp intent IDs are also apparently consecutive. They both involve taverns and gambling, and they each have slippery titles: the story file for Gambler’s Quest is actually called tavernkeepers-tale.z5, whereas that for Copper Tavern is just story.z5, but the in-game banner text refers to it as THE TAVERN HEIST. They even both have the same weird feature disabling transcripting!

Given all these highly suspicious circumstances, I was convinced the two games were linked, that there was some metapuzzle connecting them, some hidden detail that when plugged from one into the other would unlock an elaborate reward (or at least funny in-jokes). So the whole time I was playing Copper Tavern, I was alt-tabbing over to Gambler’s Quest to cross-reference descriptions, try similar actions, and otherwise try to catch the author – surely it’s just a single author! – out.

None of that worked, though, up to and including decompiling both games via glulx-strings. Could be there’s a secret here, but if so, I don’t have brain enough to crack it. Unfortunately though that means I have no idea what it’s like to play Copper Tavern straight. I think it would be a pretty fun time, for what it is? There are a couple of funny meta-jokes, like the way the game initially seems very focused on the incongruity of toting an AK-47 around a generic fantasy world, but it turns out it’s completely useless. The writing is pretty generic, but not bad for all that, and some optional actions and scenery are implemented, which helps the player feel like they have something to do. The puzzles solve themselves in rather silly ways, which will frustrate anyone looking for a challenge, I suppose, but I’m not sure it’s reasonable to come to a game like this with that expectation. I didn’t find the anachronistic joke about Amazon funny, but again, I wasn’t seriously thinking that this game would share my sense of humor.

These are all just guesses, though – I can’t actually write that review because I didn’t play that game. Instead I played Copper Tavern, a frustratingly opaque mystery-object that was nonetheless pretty compelling for a while; I’d recommend that you give it a whirl, but unfortunately now that you’ve read this, you can’t.