Orcish Inn Demo

It’s not easy to create a sandbox game that allows players to enjoy themselves for a long time without getting bored, especially if the experience in question does not involve multiplayer. Building structures, crafting objects and interacting with the world on your own has its limits in regards to replayability, but the illusion can be extended with the right mixture of gameplay mechanics.

Orcish Inn is a sandbox/survival game with structure building, map exploration and resource gathering mechanics, in which you play the role of an orc trying to start a business of his own in the middle of nowhere. Thus, you have everything at your disposal to build a tavern, plant the necessary crops to obtain various drinks, as well as accommodate your visitors with beds and nice rooms.

You start by allowing the game to randomly generate a map for you, although you do not have to settle until you are satisfied with the results. Hence, you can continue to generate new maps until you find what you want, or just hope for the best and pick the first one, given the fact that you can always find resources, regardless of the map layout. Granted, some layouts may be more beneficial than others, depending on the situation.

The game is in a very early development stage at the moment, so it’s only natural that it has a few problems in regards to the mechanics. However, the controls are not very intuitive, since you usually have to hold keys or perform combinations in order to achieve pretty simple actions. The interface is a bit of a mess at the moment as well, since you are bombarded with information and not many explanations, but all of this can be fixed over the course of the development process.

Lastly, the game’s graphics are particularly pretty, especially since everything is extremely colorful and nicely animated. It might be difficult to observe the walls that block your path sometimes, but everything else is spot on, even in this pre-alpha state. The music is not bad either, although the soundtrack could use more variety, because it gets repetitive after a while.

In the end, Orcish Inn could easily be the type of sandbox games that keeps you busy for weeks, especially if the crafting part is refined. The random maps and all the intricacies that go into building a tavern and raising your own crops should be enough to provide you with many unique playthroughs.