I’ve previously written on Crossroads Inn, a promising indie game about managing the inn’s (get it?) and out’s of managing your very own tavern. Make beer, trade for goods, build recipes to offer hungry travelers; it all really seems solid on paper when you write it out.
Yet the indie developer Kraken Unleashed might have been better off letting the dinner cook for a wee bit longer. Crossroads Inn released on October 23rd on Steam, and was slammed pretty hard in reviews for a mind-boggling amount of bugs that caused users to crash to desktop, lose their save games, or make their inn simply unplayable. Workers get stuck in their pathing, they won’t take orders from patrons, and some items in the game simply don’t work at all as they should.
We are working hard to fix all the bugs from Crossroads Inn! Expect huge update tomorrow!
Join our Discord channel for more Community Memes: https://t.co/3zxc1kihla! pic.twitter.com/LIVK7AKebA
— Crossroads Inn 2 (@thecinngame) October 29, 2019
It would frankly be better to state what does work; the charm is there in spades, and when it’s all functioning as it should be, the game is tremendously engrossing as players manage their taverns develop from shacks to sprawling estates. The problem is obviously that the game simply fails to function as it should.
If this was released as an early-access title, there wouldn’t even be a story here to report upon; early-access games are known for their bugs that stifle gameplay, users understand what they’re purchasing, and the community grows as they tackle problems together. Everybody wins in that situation, right?
Unfortunately, Crossroads Inn was released as a full title, ready for the world to experience. This frustrated many consumers who figured the game would at least be playable.
To the developer studio’s credit, they’ve opted to not take the No Man’s Sky approach, and have actively been building and releasing patches as fast as their fingers have let them. More so, they’re active on their community discussion pages, notating bugs and figuring out how to reproduce them.
It was this gesture, apparently, of being willing to fix their own games that gave them the idea to post an announcement from the developers, to the community, asking them to kindly reconsider rating the game negatively, and instead, opt to review positively in the hope that the developers would continue to fix it. This caused the bit of bad blood currently found between developer and their fans to expand, as it seemed obscene that a title that was released in a fascinatingly broken state had earned a positive review at all, much less based off the developer promise that they’ll ‘fix it in the future’.
It’s clear to anyone that uses the Steam platform that games that have ratings below ‘Mostly Positive’ struggle to attract fans; the ‘Mixed’ review average might as well say ‘Don’t Buy’. Kraken Unleashed is clearly at a dilemma, and their plea to consumers kind of makes sense from their viewpoint.
From a consumer perspective, however, it’s borderline obscene. Here’s hoping that Kraken Unleashed will get rid of their own bug infestation, so we can start living the medieval inn life we all hope for.
