Innkeep lets you play an extremely suspect fantasy innkeeper, though I’m sure the bloodstains on your apron can be easily explained

The classic life sim begins with you inheriting property—a farm or a shop that you take over in a legal and above-board fashion. Innkeep does not begin like that. As the trailer revealed at the Frosty Games Fest shows, Innkeep opens with you walking through the door of a tavern in time to see its owner’s head leave his shoulders. The customers, a gang of tomb robbers, essentially bully you into replacing the innkeeper. Little do they realize, you’d already stolen a letter of ownership and were planning to take the place over anyway.

With everyone involved now painted morally gray, you become an innkeeper who has to prepare food and serve drinks and all that kind of job-simulating stuff. But you also get to eavesdrop on the thugs who serve as your patrons, and if they let slip they’ve got loot, you can sneak into their rooms and steal it at night.

It’s an interesting twist on a genre that’s normally as wholesome as brown bread. Innkeep casts you as someone who might serve rat meat to the customers when you’re not pinching gold coins from their boots, and by the end of the trailer you’re involved in a demon-summoning ritual. Well, that escalated quickly.

Another interesting detail is that Innkeep is set during a gold rush on tombs considered holy to the local gods. It seems you can befriend some of the shady customers that attracts to assemble your own band of adventurers, and “work together to reveal an ancient secret, before the flames of war engulf your new-found home.”

I do like a game that lets you play someone who’d ordinarily be a background NPC, like Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale or Strange Horticulture. In his bloodstained apron, the innkeep of Innkeep is exactly the kind of overlooked background character with a hidden past RPGs thrive on, and who players will spend an entire session obsessing over in a typical game of D&D, whether you intended them to or not.

Innkeep is currently in development, with dev blogs being posted regularly on its Steam page.