Tavern Talk Stories: Dreamwalker Demo Available Today

Special thanks to Future Friends Games and Gentle Troll for early demo access!

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Get your libation of choice ready and fire up Steam; Gentle Troll Entertainment has released a demo of their upcoming Tavern Talk Stories: Dreamwalker, a prequel to their 2024 game Tavern Talk. I’d been a massive fan of that game, so when I was presented with the opportunity to play a demo for Dreamwalker early, I jumped at the chance.

It’s a lot of what made the first game so special to me and many others: gorgeous art with a warm glow to it that jumps off the screen, packed with all kinds of details from the lighthouse in the window to the mounted fish on the wall, to the small peek of the quest board that returning Tavern Talk players know well. I wanted to pull up a bench right next to Mariyam and shoot the breeze about what’s happening in Phesoa.

(I should note that even before you get into any of that, you can name your character and select their pronouns as well, a wonderful nod to the inclusive atmosphere from the first game.)

In announcing Dreamwalker, Gentle Troll mentioned certain mechanics in the game were going to be revised, and you notice that immediately as you craft your first drink. Instead of one potion each for strength, charisma, dexterity, intelligence, and defense, you’re faced with six potions at the start. Some will boost more than one attribute, while some will subtract. As I played the demo, I was given two more potions to work into the mix, which meant I could make the same drink in different ways.

The display where you see what you’re concocting for your patrons is much more straightforward here; a bar graph for each attribute versus the line/area plot from the first game.

Again, you have a companion at your side while making drinks, making it so you never have to admit you made a mistake! I loved Andu from the first game, but in Dreamwalker, your companion is none other than Captain Beebug, who might be my new favorite creature ever.

For those who played Tavern Talk, the dialogue is full of references you’ll recognize, but you don’t have to have played it to enjoy Dreamwalker. Quest making returns in the game as well, but the demo didn’t dive into that as much as I hoped. It sounds like you’ll need to weed out embellished stories from true rumors here, which could make things interesting as the rumors pile up.