Once I'm done dumping bloodied corpses into the sewers, I'll be serving my Blood Bar Tycoon customers

It’s a strange Halloween summer week for games. Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s October 31 release date was previously leaked, Steam has made a Summer Horror Night bundle featuring RPS favourite Hauntii, and I’m feeling a strange urge to devour Haribo and mini Double Deckers until my eyes bleed. What a perfect time, then, to dive into the alpha demo of vampire management game Blood Bar Tycoon, especially since Two Point seems to be resting on its laurels a little too comfortably for my liking.

The idea is that you build a fancy bar serving up burgundy cosmopolitans, stout coffees and, uh, visceral vampires to your undead clientele. But blood doesn't grow on trees (except for the red-worm Dracaena cinnabari), so you'll also be working as a manhunter. You'll be researching a series of “crazy contraptions” to extract their blood, which I really enjoy, because “crazy blood loss” is a real winner of a feature. But you can't just perform pointless phlebotomy with impunity – you'll also want to be wary of the vampire hunters, aka the fun police.

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The demo starts innocently enough. I tell my minion Raphael (a source of plenty of 'for a living!' jokes) to clean an old bed, then put up a table, chairs and a beer pit. The game lets me tinker with his work schedule a bit so he can clean up and serve drinks without me having to be told, and then I open the bar. He serves a bearded dude named Cyrus a cold beer after completing his duty and collects his money, at which point the game tells me to drain the blood from Raphael's neck. That's how you feed your workers. Cyrus collapses, and trusty Raph puts his body in a body bag and dumps it in the sewer. That's where the term 'manhole' comes from, I'm told.

There are a lot of nicely detailed animations throughout, like Raphael sliding the body bag down the manhole with his foot. The natural next step after murder and body disposal is of course the interior decoration, so I set about increasing the prestige level of my bar. A table here, a dartboard there, an extra body hole in the back, you know the drill. Soon, more walking lunchboxes with full wallets enter the bar, and I return to serving drinks. I take the opportunity to look at Raphael's information panel, noting that he has a 'memory wipe' ability that he can use on 'witnesses', which I think is something you'd want to use to avoid vampire hunters.

We serve customers in Blood Bar Tycoon.

Image credit: Clever Trickster/Rock Paper Gun

Then I work on attracting a real vampire to the bar, which I do by filling the fridges with delicious blood bags. Vladimir finally comes around, impressed enough by my opening a blood bar in this part of town that he gives me a nice investment capital. A capitalist vampire, huh? I guess I've just been sucked into an insatiable parasitic leech. He's a vampire too! Awww! Time to start building then…

I can see myself spending a bit more time with Blood Bar Tycoon. I was initially afraid that it would rely on aesthetics while being a bit flat to actually play, which I've noticed is a bit of a given in a few strategy and management sub-genres. But I think there's some real heart to it, plus a few clever ideas that fit comfortably into an already comfortable framework. You can find the free Alpha on Steam here . Happy summer!

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