The Brew Barons unfolds in a horrifying world where most agricultural tasks and outdoor mechanical activities are carried out using the medium of heavily armed seaplanes. Need apples for cider? Fly through the trees, cannons ablazing. Need to gather wheat? Fly the plane through the field using its propeller as a scythe, with different types of wheat requiring tougher propeller blades. Need to haul up scavenge from the ocean floor? Use the plane’s sea anchor as a rudimentary fishing claw. Need to open a box you found on the beach? The plane’s the thing, etcetera.
The Brew Barons : Release Trailer!
As I play through the opening hour, an awful picture forms of Lifetap Studios’ Rob Hartley and Diccon Yamanaka, two Ubisoft and Relic alumni who have discovered in each other the same, fearful mania for the unguessed applications of World War-era aviation technology. I imagine rooms full of sobbing relatives at the sadly neglected Hartley estates in Vancouver, their once-majestic grounds strewn with chunks of fuselage, the gilded doorknobs and marble busts of elder Hartleys speckled with bullet holes.
“Please, Uncle Bob,” one young man begs, as Rob Hartley advances on the vegetable patch making whoo-whoo noises. “You can’t dig up potatoes using planes.” In The Brew Barons, you can dig up potatoes using planes. But first, you’ll need to equip your planes with hydrokinetic bombs provided by a local farmer of deeply unsound mind and possible Satanic derivation. The Brew Barons looks like a Studio Ghibli film – like Porco Rosso in particular, with a gorgeous pseudo-Adriatic island chain setting of waxen yellows, terracotta pinks and wavering blues. It should look like an especially bad day in Fallout 3. It should consist of apple-scented craters and raggedy columns of refugees winding through the burning vineyards, their eyes forever upturned in terror of the men who insist on doing every last goddamn thing with planes.
If the ordinary earth-dwelling folk of The Brew Barons are scared witless, they at least have plenty of opportunities to drown their sorrows. The Brew Barons is a flight sim, yes – an easygoing Pilot Wings-style affair with moderately extensive plane customisation, and missions that alternate between delivering supplies and dogfighting with pirate aces and monstrous airships. But it’s also, somehow, a brewing sim. You operate out of a hangar that has a distillery and customisable bar built over it, and the game’s missions and economic aspect are all to do with concocting your own brands of hooch, cascading the ingredients into a mixing vat either according to recipes you uncover or based on your evolving understanding of the trade.
You don’t accidentally make a game that combines flight-simming with brewing, I think. You don’t pluck the concept absent-mindedly from the tag cloud. It has to be something of an obsession. As I experiment with different ratios of grapes, honey and apple, another dire image forms of Diccon Yamanaka in meetings during his time at Ubisoft, an acrid presence in the corner who must never be looked at directly. “What is this prototype missing?” a producer asks, forgetting herself. Yamanaka stirs. A junior programmer tries to cut him off, but not quickly enough. “More yeast,” says Yamanaka, his voice rising to a wail. “More yeast.”
The Brew Barons is out tomorrow on Steam, and notwithstanding my feelings of alarm about its… specificity, I did enjoy the hour I spent wafting around the islands, shooting the hell out of orchards so I could whip up some extremely bland punch. I’m not sure the flight mechanics will hold the attention of serious genre fans, but the ambience and brewing mechanics are really rather lovely and look, in an increasingly conservative industry, flights of fancy of this sort are to be encouraged.
