As of writing the game is still in EA, and frankly that shows in a couple of places but overall it's a fun little management sim with charming pixel art and a great soundtrack.

As I said, there are some rough spots, particularly around UI and balance, but I suspect those will be ironed out over time, and the devs have already said they plan to flesh out some of the existing features which I think will improve things a lot.

At around 10 hours I've basically seen what there is to see, but I'm excited to come back in 6 months and see what progress has been made. This is a really promising start.

Nice small-scale tycoon game. Be aware that the "tycoon" part itself is fairly shallow and quite easy, but there's a relatively complex and engaging puzzle game lurking just under the surface which helps keep things interesting and gates progression...this was not what I expected from the game description, but I'm here for it. The core gameplay loop (develop recipe, brew beer, ship enough beer to unlock next style/ingredient) is quite good.

The game could benefit from measures to clean up some of the tedium. I'd like it if my custodians could actually take care of the building without needing my manual intervention, for instance, and it would be nice to be able to automate aging (i.e. set an action to take in a future season for a barrel). It also feels like we could use a "fast forward through nights/weekends" setting too, since pretty much nothing happens then and I've developed a habit of switching speeds twice a week.

There are also some spots where the UX is currently a bit rough, especially with respect to research. Progression between monastery stages can put you in a bad spot if you don't know what to expect with contracts changing to bigger quantities, and the research tree is really unclear about how to fix it, with critical technologies being hidden in inaccessible tiers. Unlocking some other technologies (especially ingredients) does absolutely nothing until you progress far enough in the campaign, but there's no way to know that either. And you can't tell how big decorations are or whether they sit on the floor or a wall until after you research them. Aside from research, there's often some flipping back and forth between pages when developing recipes or setting up for brewing a batch which seems like it should be unnecessary if the right information was in the right place.

The developers seem to be highly responsive and patches actually improve things. I'm pretty sure they'll fix up the rough bits in short order and the result will be a real gem which brings a unique twist to the genre.

If I could give it a rating I would give it a neutral. My biggest gripe is that it feels far to linear. It forces you to play the game in a way that doesn't allow any creativity. You should be able to make any beer at any level assuming you get the ingredients. It just feels kinda boring the way its set up.