Why Crossroads Inn Has Me Excited

I love everything medieval, such as Medieval Dynasty and the Mount and Blade games. So, it was no surprise that I would enjoy Crossroads Inn. Developed and published by Klabater. I was given the opportunity to play the new Nintendo Switch version that is due at the end of September 2022. But is this title worth your time? 

Gameplay 

Crossroads Inn lets the player set up their own inn during medieval times. There are three game modes: scenario, campaign, and sandbox. I would recommend playing the campaign first as it’s a great intro on how to manage your inn and introduces you to a bunch of characters. While playing as a potential heir to the Kingdom. There is an option to skip the prologue which I found very useful especially when I realized, I messed up during the first chapter. 

Before you can open you must build the various rooms that you need for your inn, such as a Large Hall where patrons go to drink and eat. The Kitchen is where all the lovely meals are cooked. A storage room to store all the inn’s food and drink. You can then fill these rooms with various furnishings and items. Once furnished you then need to hire staff to help run your inn. items are unlocked gradually either through completing the campaign via in-game events or by buying them from the various Towns and villages surrounding your inn. 

Once you have your staff and the item set up either need to register recipes in your menu and also obtain the ingredients from the Towns and villages on the overview map. Fortunately, you have to keep an eye on the supplies as they won’t automatically resupply when you’ve run out of ingredients. You can display the number of ingredients you have left on the main screen however on the switch version if you have more than one item on the screen, they overlap each other and make it difficult to see which number belongs to which item. 

When you start welcoming guests in. You need to manage your staff effectively. There are multiple different types of staff, and each has its own list of tasks that they can perform. Servers are probably the most important employee as not only do they serve food and drinks but they also clean and welcome guests into the inn. If you don’t have enough servers your patrons will start to complain and will even leave before paying. This can be difficult to manage especially when trying to keep it under budget. 

All in all, it was a very enjoyable experience it did get very difficult during the main campaign. However, this just makes me want to play more and discover better ways of managing my inn. I’ve spent at least eight hours in this game already and I feel like I’ve barely touched the surface. 

Presentation 

Graphically the game looks very beautiful and highly detailed even when rendered on the switch. The story’s characters have a lot of detail and really set them apart from the other NPCs.

A downside to the graphics on the switch is that the font size is tiny when playing on tablet mode. This isn’t such an issue if you’re playing at home or in the shade but if you’re on a public bus or on a train, reflections from the sun can make it hard to read. I would have appreciated either a font choice or a font increase option. But playing on a TV screen Makes for a much more enjoyable experience. It would have been helpful if there were tooltips when highlighting various icons on the user interface. Instead, you must go online to find out what they each mean 

Crossroads Inn’s Performance 

On the Nintendo Switch, the Crossroads Inn runs very well. There are no frame drops even when there are loads of patrons in your inn. Unfortunately, it suffers from one glaring issue. During my time playing it, I experienced multiple crashes that booted the Switch back to the Home screen. This can be frustrating, especially if either you or the game doesn’t save regularly enough. Luckily for me, I only lost around 10 minutes of gameplay, if that. The real issue is that it does seem to repeat crashing at about the same spot. However, this does go away after the third or fourth try. 

Final Thoughts 

Crossroads Inn is a very enjoyable title and it is very difficult to rate fairly. I’m basing my experience purely on the Nintendo Switch version. I have noted down various issues that I have with the game, but I do think I will be spending many hours enjoying the management side of the game as well as the interesting story. So in my opinion crossroads in barely gets a four out of five. Should these shortcomings be fixed on a release or in the not-too-distant future the game will easily get a 4.5

If you want to purchase the game click here