In terms of absolute absorption, nothing hits quite like a management simulator firing on all cylinders. When you get it right, the fruits of your labor are self-evident. The business begins to run itself. It opens up a second part of the game where money is a secondary concern and you can do all the big changes you had planned from the start, but lacked the resources to pull off. When a management simulator works, it’s such a pure expression of risk/reward, one that is so deeply entrenched in player choice and agency, that it carries a singular feeling of achievement.
It takes a while to get there. You’ve got to put the elbow grease in first. You’ve got to drain a lot of humans of their lifeforce before you have a bustling blood bar. You’ve got to manage both an audience of vampires and humans and make sure that when the two intersect, it does not create any grotesque scenes that are bad for business.
Blood Bar Tycoon is a clever indie simulator which lands its execution cleanly between the Two Point series and something like a The Sims vampire-themed expansion, if Two Point followed the same expansion-based model. It could so easily be a hypothetical extension of one of those games. That it’s not and is it’s own independent thing, means that it does have important differences.
The play loop of a Two Point game is that you have to balance the needs of your spaces with the themed reason for its existence. Whether it’s a school or a hospital, you’ll design around the needs of the institution. Then you’ll hire and train staff. You’ll begin filling the rooms of your campus or hospital with themed objects that have bonuses attached to them.
That’s also how Blood Bar Tycoon works. But it has a clever trick to it. The main hook is that you are providing spaces for your customers, both humans and vampires, while maintaining a space where your minions (workers) will drain the customers of their blood, to sell back to the vampires. It’s a situation where design is focused on cultivating the right stock of booze and blood, and ensuring that pesky investigators do not draw so much attention to your bar that it’s overrun by hunters, who will kill your minions, vampire customers, and destroy your life-extracting machines.
It’s such a fun content loop. It’s a joyous process, blending design themes, which are unlocked throughout the course of the game, whether you’re designing a ’70s rock and roll dinner, a tiki, pirate, or cyberpunk themed bar, or maybe just a gothic watering hole for bloodsuckers. The themes contain roughly the same materials but the variety of the objects is enough to create stark visual differences between spaces, and for it to be fun to blend them into rooms that serve multiple purposes.
Although this release officially marks version 1.0, there is still work to be done. The building and construction model is the most pressing concern for simulation and management-minded players. The current method of construction is frustrating. You cannot build a big space and then divide it with walls. You can only create new spaces or extend the spaces you already have, or destroy them, and then create new rooms. This leads to certain limitations later on, when you’re ready to really shape your blood bar to your heart’s desire, and the functions of the game’s construction model are not yet up to the task.
Yet, the developers are super-responsive thus far, clearly dedicated to the longterm support of their project. We found a plethora of small bugs over the course of the campaign. Customers getting stuck on objects or in zones. Menus disappearing. One later level, the second to last one, required at least five restarts, and still perhaps not fully functioning. But, hot fixes have already continually addressed our concerns, and the game is a delight, if you’re willing to be patient with the developers.
The theme is squeezed for all of its blood. Themed missions do a good job leading the player through the core features of the game and showing them what they’ll need to do to cultivate a successful blood bar. Meanwhile, side characters pop in and request more short-term objectives, like delivering a certain amount of blood bags and blood slushies in a short period of time. There is a risk/reward tied into all the game’s systems and as the game’s post-launch development continues, more of their nuances ought to be drawn to the service.
Now, we can appreciate Blood Bar Tycoon for exactly what it is — a more charming, lightweight alternative to the Two Point model, which has a super-fun theme and compelling layers of management complexity. The game, as it already stands, is deeply absorbing in the way the best management simulators are. It’s going to require a bit more development to get it all the way across the line, but the 1.0 release is most of the way there. Blood Bar Tycoon will be a great investment in the near future, where it’s sure to become a must-play management simulator. For now, it’s a very good one, with a lot of upside in the future.
Reviewed on Steam Deck (non-optimized)