Demo code provided, and many thanks to BitCover.
Lakeside Bar is an idle game about a little robot that runs a bar. You get to decorate your bar, hire employees, and decide the menu of your little space, as well as play outside during your off hours.
The Look and Feel of Lakeside Bar
Lakeside Bar is an idle game you can put at the bottom of your screen or play on full screen. It is a pixel-art game with adorable little critters that come to visit your little tavern. There is also an outside play area where you can sit on a swing, go fishing, or sit around a campfire and let the world pass you by.
You purchase drinks, fill up your menu, then set your bar’s sign to open to start accepting customers. As they pour in, you will need to serve them, clean tables, fetch drinks, buy more stock, hire employees, and things like that. You can open and close the bar at anytime, including if you want to redecorate or get some fishing done.
It begins with just beer, but then you start to unlock mixed drinks to serve. Each of these drinks get you significantly higher profit margins. After a bit, you can also hire a sentient microwave to cook meals for your bar, like Chorizo Nachos and Surf ‘n Turf Tacos. All the food and drinks look super adorable, and all the patrons celebrate when they get their pretty drink or stylish bar food.
Currently, there is a lot to unlock in Lakeside Bar, including indoor decorations, more employees, outdoor decorations, and training for your employees. Some of the stuff is obviously locked because this is a demo, but what is available is really cute.
The Pros of Lakeside Bar
It’s a very cute idle game. Once you have a couple of upgrades and employees, it will mostly play itself. You can then send your little robot off to fish, then play some bar games yourself. This unlocks even more of the decorations that you can buy with the three different currencies in Lakeside Bar. Overall, it’s a lot of fun and has a lot of options for a demo; I hope the full game has a lot more customization options like flooring and outfits.
The gameplay is very easy to pick up, and it reminds me a lot of another idle game I played recently that I loved a lot: Bao Bao’s Cozy Laundromat. It has the same selection of cute items, the same great music, and the same kind of vibes. I like having it running in the background while I’m going about my day so I can check in regularly to see what new items have been unlocked.
The Cons of Lakeside Bar
I don’t have a whole lot of complaints about Lakeside Bar, but there were a couple of things that stood out to me as things that could use improvement. The first one is that you cannot move objects once you have placed them. If you accidently put an item in the wrong location, you can’t pick it up; you have to sell it back for less money than you paid for it and rebuy it to place it again. This is something that a lot of these idle games seem to do at first; I hope the developers come up with a way to move items instead.
Another small issue I had with Lakeside Bar is that the second server employee kind of broke the game a little bit. I had a server to help me get drinks to tables named Luke, and then I saved up enough money to hire a second one, named Rena. But when Rena started working, Luke got stuck and couldn’t move or interact with anything until I restarted the game.
The customers have different needs when they come in the bar, and they will be unhappy if you don’t offer anything they want to eat or drink. But there isn’t room in the menu to serve everything all at once, so some customers will always be unhappy. I wish there was a way to fix this, because I don’t like my customers having little meh faces, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to make everyone happy.
My last issue with Lakeside Bar was the three currencies. There is a gold coin, a bronze coin, and a silver coin. Gold is obtained from selling items in the bar, like food and drinks. The silver coin is from playing mini-games, and the bronze coin is from catching and selling fish. They are used separately in different shops to earn decorations, but the bronze coin and the gold coin look too much alike in my opinion.
For the first bit of the game, I couldn’t figure out why it kept saying I didn’t have enough money when I obviously did. Also, there is no passive way to earn silver like you can with the bronze and gold coins, which is fine if you like the mini-games, but really stinks if you don’t. There is currently only one mini-game in Lakeside Bar, so I hope you like darts!
Final Thoughts
Lakeside Bar is a very cute game. I like it a lot. It has a few small issues, and a lot of the game is obviously missing from the demo, but I love what I have seen so far. I hope they add tons more foods and decorations and the ability to make your own drinks at some point. I look forward to seeing how this one evolves.
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