Welcome to Dungeon Inn from developer Cat Society, a cozy little game about a girl named Sara and her cats Butter and Bami, who live in a hotel with a dungeon. If they don’t make enough money a dragon will eat them. This sounds very much like a VHS tape someone had in the dorm when I was in college. Some bright spark then put this on the big TV in the rec room over Thanksgiving weekend only to have the Dean came by with his family in tow to wish all the stay-behind residents a happy holiday and we all ended up on double secret probation.

Should I eat them now or save them for later?

Developer: Cat Society
Publisher: Spiral Up Games
Platform: PC/Steam
Release Date: Nov 13th 2024
Price: $12.99 (Early Access)

An Elf a Mushroom and a whatever the heck that purple thing is walk into a bar.

Fortunately for all of us it not the kind of Dungeon you might be thinking. Its an interesting twist on the management genre and it works pretty well. So meet your main characters, Sara, Butter, and Bami the last two are cat people and not cats . Well I guess they are cats but also people. Because... Of course they are.... MOVING ON!

Anyway they encounter a dragon who instead of eating them accepts our heroes pitch that he should front them some gold to start a business catering to those adventurers foolish enough to delve in the dungeon. So in classic “offer you cant refuse” style they open an inn with the understanding that from the proceeds must pay a weekly tribute to the dragon, if they know what good for them. Think of the dragon as a kinder, genteler version of the IRS.

Chose carefully , only one path has a Coffee Hut!

If that wasn’t tricky enough, your potential customers are two rival guilds of adventurers, the Mountain Guild and the Seaside Guild, If they figure out that the inn is willingly serving the opposing guild its the end of the line. This is measured by “suspicion,” rising suspicion levels must be monitored and mitigated where possible. Overall game-play is turn based and rather linear, with two separate paths from each guild’s home city leading to your inn. To manage the flow of customers you place things along their route to speed them up, slow them down or get some coin off them. In other words is kind of like a less frustrating version of an IKEA store. Once they actually get to the inn you have to keep them satisfied with amenities and by meeting various demands for specialty food and libations. The story is a bit predictable if you ever worked in hospitality, lots of customer complaints about trivial issues and I couldn’t find the “feed this knob to the dragon” button.

In terms of flow the whole thing runs on a weekly schedule, where you manage the inn for five days, complete a number of missions and keep your customers from wrecking anything. Missions can range from spotting particular customers for story reasons to meeting “financial goals” because its a lovely Inn and it would be a shame if something “happened to it.” At the end of each month, the trio reports to the dragon in charge of their contract. Miss your goal even by one gold piece and you have to repeat the whole week. Even weather come into play when you have people stuck in the mud and lighting strikes that fry customers. That’s all well and good because the downside is that you need the extra event to spice things up a bit. As I said before the game is quite linear and without the extra events its quite repetitive although it seems the game is still being actively developed so this will evolve over time.

Bottom Line Dungeon Inn is a nice little title that while needing some polish exceeds expectations and adds a bit of originality that isn’t found outside of Indie games anymore. I look forward to trying the title again in a few months to see what has been done.

Technical note, as of the time of writing, this game runs without difficulty on Linux Mint 22 using Valve’s Proton compatibility layer.

The Good:

Interesting Concept
Decent Execution
Reasonable Price

The Bad:

Repetitive
Typos
Gameplay somewhat incompleate.

Dungeon Inn Review (PC)