Saloon Simulator
This sim has charm, grit, and whiskey, but it's a rough ride out the gate.
Saloon Simulator quite literally throws you into the dusty dilapidated town of Blueberry. Tasked with rebuilding the saloon and town with nothing but a broom, bucket, and willpower. It's a game that cleverly blends cozy job simulation gameplay with a dusty Western backdrop and an intriguing story. Behind the saloon doors, however, you'll find a title that is still figuring out how to serve the full-service experience.
UX (Control Feel & User Experience)
Saloon Simulator makes a strong first impression with its clean, uncluttered HUD and clear quest markers that make it easy to follow the main storyline. The tutorial system is refreshingly simple, offering a dedicated section in the pause menu for revisiting core mechanics at any time. Basic interactions, whether cleaning, using tools, or speaking to NPCs, are handled with a straightforward mouse or button click. This keeps the moment-to-moment gameplay intuitive and approachable. This simplistic approach not only helps with onboarding, but also supports an experience that feels accessible and well-organized from the start.
Gameplay Progression
This title is, first and foremost, story-focused. Almost every new upgrade or skill is gated behind story progression. That means you cannot fully engage in the simulation aspects unless you complete specific quests. On one hand, this keeps the narrative cohesive. On the other, it creates a few frustrating bottlenecks:
You sometimes can’t close your saloon during story tasks, so customers will continue pouring in while you sprint around town trying to track down items or NPCs.
Dialogue doesn’t pause the game, so as you talk to someone mid-story, the line at your bar keeps growing.
You can’t free-play until you have completed the available storyline
Another noticeable absence? Helpers. If you are an avid consumer of simulation games, you'll likely be familiar with the mechanic of being able to hire and assign various NPC assistants to offload some your regular tasks. Not only does this help smooth out gameplay, but prevents players from feeling overwhelmed so early in the game. Typically once players have progressed beyond unlocking everything and completing a major storyline, the gameplay becomes endless, monotonous, and can eventually feel overwhelming. Tasks such as cleaning, bussing tables, and restocking are alleviated, allowing the player to focus on core mechanics such as managing the establishment, cooking, and preparing drinks.
Initially, the developers stated that there were no plans for adding this to the game, and instead were working on dialing back the influx of customers. Now they have stated that in coming updates we can expect to see more unlockable employees down the road.
Regardless of helpers or not, from what I experienced, the customer AI is incredibly forgiving. You can completely mess up orders and still get paid; drinks without ice, lacking ingredients, or serving the wrong type of food, at most will land you some snarky comments from the bar or dining room. You can even still expect full payment and a tip on the way out. Aside from some minor verbal complaints, there is no real penalty for making mistakes, or shutting down the saloon at your discretion, and no reputation system tracking your performance. While the game lacks assistance in the traditional sim game sense, it also doesn't arbitrarily punish the player for not keeping pace with the endless line of patrons awaiting service.
Immersion
There’s a strong sense of atmosphere in Saloon Simulator. Between the dusty frontier vibe, the progression of your saloon, and the routine of managing a bustling bar, it is easy to become lost in it all and fall into a newly familiar routine. Unfortunately, a few quirks do put some holes in the immersion:
Story cutscenes remove all your furniture. The saloon you’ve spent hours customizing suddenly becomes an empty room during key events. This makes those standout moments feel jarring and hollow, especially since other games manage to avoid this.
NPC audio and behavior can be strange. You can walk away during story dialogue and still hear NPCs speaking directly into your ear. Facial animations can be off-putting, and sometimes story NPCs will sprint awkwardly across the map to catch up with you if you stray too far.
An occasional audio bug causes music to cut out. Particularly when the pianist switches songs, there will be long noticeable lulls in all gameplay music. This is temporary, but breaks the mood and atmosphere.
Table service can glitch. Sometimes placing a dish just throws it on the ground, or a certain seat becomes completely unserviceable until you reload the save file.
None of these are game-breaking, but they add up, and for a game built around immersion, they are hard to ignore.
Stability & Performance
I logged about 15 hours of gameplay and didn’t experience any crashes or hard freezes, which is noteworthy. That said, I continue to experience a recurring issue with rental room doors not closing properly once occupied with guests. The doors appear open and empty, but you hit an invisible wall when entering. If you try to disregard the issue, customers stop requesting rooms altogether as the game identifies the room as forever occupied. The only fix was saving and restarting the game. Anything that completely disrupts gameplay or renders the game unplayable as normally intended should be a top-priority issue to fix; so far there have been no attempts to fix this
According to the official Discord, other players have encountered a wide variety of issues ranging from grammatical errors and mistranslations in many languages; NPCs disappearing during key story sequences; objects vanishing during quests, forcing a reload to progress; visual bugs such as story props not appearing or key items being glitched and unable to interact with. In the worst cases, the game does not launch at all. But this does not always mean there is an issue with the game; Steam lists minimum system specifications to run games in the store page for a reason, so not doing your due diligence before purchasing should not see blame placed on the developers or the game itself for this issue.
To the developers’ credit, many of these bugs have been acknowledged, and they are actively working to collect data to reproduce and ultimately squash them. On Monday, July 21 the first post-launch hotfix was pushed for this game addressing the following items:
Reduced customer frequency. While the developers are still working on implementing staff management in an upcoming major update, this should slightly slow down the rate in which customers appear both in the story and free play mode.
Fixed a bug were rugs would revert to their original color after loading a save; after playing this hotfix, I now notice that I have some rugs disappearing that did not happen before.
Fixed looping dialogue issues.
Fixed shop display issues on non-standard screen resolutions.
Several other small and medium bugs that have been reported are now fixed.
Added some hidden cash to obtain to make some parts of the story a bit more manageable.
Included some information about a possible workaround for game crashes related to DirectX 11.
Value
At $18.99 USD / $25.50 CAD / €17.50, Saloon Simulator sits in the mid-tier price range for indie sims. But, in its current state, it’s hard to justify a flawless rating.
Right now, Saloon Simulator is asking players to be patient. Though one post-launch update has been published, and we are hoping for more in the near future, there are still glaring issues that need to be addressed; mainly the issues forcing many of us to reload saves just to continue to play.
This corner of the gaming community is very patient and understanding, most of all with Early Access games; that doesn't mean they will wait forever.
Final Verdict
There’s something special buried in Saloon Simulator. The core gameplay is compelling, the saloon atmosphere is cozy and unique, and the story does well to pull you along. If you’re excited by the concept, I’d recommend waiting a bit and following the official Rock Games Discord for future updates, announcements, and the eventual roadmap. With a bit of time and continued transparency from the development team, this game has the potential to be a standout title in the simulation space.
Joystick Score 3.5/5
A game with great potential, but one that’s still very much under construction.