Ale Abbey Review– Heavenly Brew

Ale Abbey is a management sim with a unique theme and focus. You are the leader of a medieval monastery that is fanatically obsessed with one thing and one thing only: brewing. It’s your job to take in new brothers and sisters, discover new methods of brewing alcohol, and, of course, actually brew the stuff and sell it to local villages or simply drink it all yourself. While a fun and relaxing take on the management sim, Ale Abbey can quickly slow down and might leave more experienced sim players bored after the first hour.

Ale Abbey is based on the very real and rather silly, in hindsight, tradition of monks and monasteries brewing alcohol throughout medieval times. This was especially common in northern Europe, where the practice was both an honored tradition and a necessary means for these establishments to bring in income. While the backdrop of a monastery is used as the theme for Ale Abbey, with monks and nuns serving as your loyal brewers, there is actually no religious subtext in the game, with the characters instead referring to the act of brewing as their faith. If the representation of specific religious practices makes you uncomfortable, you won’t have to worry about seeing it in Ale Abbey.

Instead, the game is all about building, managing, and expanding your brewing operation so that you can create a highly profitable ale empire across a small map of medieval towns and castles.

The game can essentially be broken down into three separate phases: brewing, management, and research.

Brewing, of course, is the act of actually making ale and selling it to the local population. Different ale types do better in different locations, and you receive weekly income for the amount of ale you’ve sold across the map. You have to physically buy the ingredients for each ale you brew, but the demand for ale is so high that it’s pretty easy to turn a profit even within the first week of sales. Generally speaking, you always want to brew a maximum of 100 LT of ale at a time, as you will always make the money back from it.

This is especially true if you have a good understanding of the game’s most interesting system: creating your own custom ale recipes.

When creating a new recipe, you can choose the amount of each necessary ingredient to add to change the properties of the ale. These properties are flavor, color, strength, and foam, and each ingredient you add changes all four sliders to a varying degree. The best ale keeps all four sliders in the green while also getting the maximum value out of each one. Adding more yeast, for example, might increase the flavor to four, but your ale’s strength might be rather low in exchange, increasing it at the cost of pushing your ale’s flavor into the muck. With enough tweaking, you can make the perfect ale and sell it for incredible profit.

As you continue to play, you’ll receive missions, usually requiring you to brew a specific style of ale, which will reward you with fame, approval, and new types of ale to brew.

The management side of gameplay involves keeping your monks happy and drunk. Each character you bring in has a contentment score as well as a series of skills that affect the quality of the brew you create. This side of the gameplay is decidedly light; you can pretty much keep everyone happy by placing down enough decorations in your abbey, and you essentially want to keep your best monks brewing at all times.

The exception to this is with new brews. When each monk brews an ale for the first time, they apply a quality score that will determine how well they make it each attempt in the future. This is somewhat randomized, and monks with worse stats can end up making better versions of a brew with some luck. Therefore, it’s sort of optimal to have each of your monks try their hand at brewing each new recipe you create to see who does the best job of it.

Research is rather self-explanatory. You assign some monks to research new technologies to expand the amount of building and brewing you can do. The vast majority of these techs are percentile bonuses to different areas throughout the game, allowing your abbey to perform better.

The most interesting part of Ale Abbey is developing your own ales, trying your hand at consistently brewing the best beers, and creating an empire by drowning the countryside in lager. As interesting as this mechanic is, however, it gets pretty repetitive, and the game lacks depth in its other areas to really make up for it. The economy is not difficult to navigate, nor is the management of your monastery, and you’ll quickly find yourself building every room and furnishing it accordingly.

While one of the more relaxing and thematically interesting management games, Ale Abbey is a game that really wants to sell you on its premise. It appeals to a specific demographic that dreams of disappearing into the countryside and brewing delicious ales in an ancient stone structure, wasting the days away in a delightful drunk stupor. If you aren’t obsessed with the theme, however, the game can quickly become repetitive and a bit boring, an issue that experienced management sim players are going to face more than others. It’s not a bad game in the slightest, but one that will either charm or lose you with its simplicity.

Try Hard Guides was provided a Steam code for this PC review of Ale Abbey. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Ale Abbey is available on Steam.