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 Cy.