The Tea Making user interface in A Tavern For Tea, showing the ingredients and fresh brew.

A Tavern For Tea is an interactive fiction game by npckc. As the owner of a tavern, you serve tea and chat with patrons in a comfortable and unassuming environment. Oh, this game has a side-dish of timeline manipulation, too.

Inside these walls, you're just my customer.

In this tea tavern, you tend bar and make just the right tea for whatever customer enters. Just like the cyberpunk bartending game VA-11 HALL-A, you drive the story by actually choosing and making the kind of tea your patrons want.

Your tavern is located "at the edge of the domain," a boundary between the world of humans and demons. Your location brings in two familiar wandering travelers, Horns and the Adventurer, from npckc's previous game, A Hero and a Garden. You explore the back story of these two patrons that have a bit of an awkward past. Perhaps, you can resolve their tension and become their matchmaker?

Shared Dialogue with The Adventurer and Horns in A Tavern for Tea

And, that's where the creativity of this game comes in—the looping narrative, with timeline manipulation. As you chat with these two, you'll eventually hit a dead-end in the story that forces you to restart. In each loop, you gain a new tidbit of information that you can use to manipulate the timeline to seek the best ending.

Gameplay Tip:

Because this game loops down and evolves over a single path, make good use of the skip all button. This button jumps you past dialogue you've already seen to either the next time you can make tea or to bits of the story you haven't seen yet.

Even if you haven't played npckc's A Hero and a Garden, A Tavern for Tea has a short playtime and unique looping narrative that is worth checking out. A Tavern for Tea is available on itch.io for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

The Missing Quests Season 1 is Complete

The Missing Quests was a season of sharing small indie games by Alex Guichet.
Stay tuned for new writing projects, or a potential next season of TMQ.
Alex Guichet @alexguichet
A screenshot of the main gameplay of Ramen Rave, showing a timer, ramen, eggs, and flavor packers.

Ramen Rave, by Andy Bae, is just your average cooking platformer—if a “cooking platformer” were a standard game genre. Tasked with making ramen for your friend Jammy’s birthday, you must use your platforming and utensil skills to make a perfect bowl of ramen. Shoot away flies and undesirable ingredients while allowing only right ingredients in—such as eggs and flavor packets.

Matching the quick preparation time of instant ramen, Ramen Rave is a fast mini-game experience that is done in just 3 minutes. The pressure stacks up as time goes on—more and more ingredients fly by, requiring you even more quickly and accurately, lest earn a lower score. When the timer runs out, your score is tallied up and added to the leaderboard.

Ramen Rave is available on itch.io for windows.