Online Multiplayer Makes Running A Tavern In Travellers Rest Better Than Ever
There’s plenty of work to go around.
One of my favorite cozy games starts with a real-life nightmare scenario: a strange man striking up a conversation at a bar when you’re just trying to go home. Fortunately, instead of awkwardly flirting or trying to explain crypto to you, he instead sells you a run-down tavern, kicking off a detailed and fun barkeeping simulator. And now, you no longer have to go into business alone, thanks to a brand-new multiplayer update.
Travellers Rest has been in Steam Early Access since July 2020. Such a long pre-release period might seem like a red flag, but the years have done wonders for Travellers Rest. I picked the game up for the first time right around its launch, and while it was a decent way to spend a weekend, it clearly had a long way to go. Four years later, after switching developers, adopting a new art style, and massively expanding its scope, Travellers Rest has a lot more to offer, now including online multiplayer.
Managing a bustling tavern is much easier with a second pair of hands.
In the world of Travellers Rest, rulers are chosen from a guild of powerful tavern keepers, owing to a legendary bartender who once united the devastated kingdom. “Only one who has served a thousand times can be worthy of being served,” as his motto goes. It’s admittedly a pretty overblown premise for a management sim, but it’s still enough to make my former barista heart swell. Thanks to your chance encounter with the swindler in the game’s opening, you find yourself with a dilapidated tavern of your own to run and begin your quest for glory.
If there’s one big complaint to levy at Travellers Rest’s long Early Access phase, it’s that the game has become a bit bloated. What began as a simple bartending sim has grown to include farming, carpentry, and cooking on top of the work of keeping customers happy. A 2024 update added an entire bustling village next to the tavern where you can buy supplies if you don’t want to spend all day grinding for them on your own, complete with a large cast of characters, though presumably interesting personalities for them are on the docket for a later update.
Decorating your tavern alone can be a full-time job.
It’s an awful lot of work just to keep your tavern running. To be fair, that’s what most players are looking for in the management sim genre, but if you find yourself just wanting to get to bartending duties, it can feel like the game gets in its own way.
With the addition of online multiplayer, that should be much less of a problem. While online multiplayer was just added, local co-op has been part of the game since 2021. I’ve spent only a fraction of my time with Travellers Rest playing co-op, but adding a second player to the mix changes the game fundamentally. Playing solo, it can feel overwhelming to have to grow crops and brew beer while also serving customers, cleaning up messes, and kicking out troublemakers.
Travellers Rest has grown a lot since its 2020 Early Access launch.
A second player totally changes the dynamics. Suddenly, Travellers Rest’s overload of activities is a boon, letting you and your partner shift through multiple different tasks on any given session, without anyone ever running out of work. It lets you devote an entire day to redecorating the tavern while the second player preps for the next shift, then divide the duty of actually running the bar once customers arrive. The addition of online multiplayer makes it significantly easier to play what might be the best version of Travellers Rest, since you can now both play from your respective couches instead of having to find time to share one. And since Travellers Rest still lacks any kind of relationship system, which are all but essential for many life sims, having another person to play with makes it a significantly less lonely affair.
Playing online in Travellers Rest requires opting into a beta, and developer Isolated Games recommends backing up your save file beforehand to prevent losing any progress. Details for how to do both of those are available in the announcement post for online multiplayer. Travellers Rest may not have even a launch window for its 1.0 release yet, but with the online features now in place, it’s one of the best times in the game’s development to start playing.
