Pintsman

About this game

Pintsman is a pub crawl roguelite built for a phone. Nine pubs in the fictional town of Ballinturlagh, one night running from half eight to half twelve, and a record nobody is keeping. The loop is short and repeats: choose a pub, order, pour, survive a social encounter, stagger to the next one, and eventually try to get home.

Six stats decide how the night goes. Form is your drinking state, and the trick is that the best earning zone sits in the middle: under 25 you are a blow-in and reputation moves slowly, 45 to 75 is Flying It, and over 90 you are Locked and a single fall ends the run. Standing is your reputation across the town, and it carries between pubs and partly between runs. Coherence governs how legible your options are and which of the four endings you get. Bladder, Coin and Pints do the rest, with €65 to start, which is what makes refusing a round tempting.

Four mini-games, none of them long

The Pour is two taps, stopping at three-quarters and topping up after the settle, with both taps scored and blended so a greedy top-up throws away a good pour. Chat Checks give you roughly two and a half seconds to answer a local, and three fails gets you barred, though it is two in Nancy Ward’s or Pakie Joe’s and one prompt bars you instantly if you answer it truthfully. The Stagger is momentum-based walking where the drift scales with your Form, so the reward for being in the zone is paid for out on the street. The Jacks is a hold-and-release window.

Getting home is the actual game

At the taxi rank you are shown your own address and then asked to give it back. Sober that is trivial, so the difficulty is entirely Coherence, which shortens the window and stops the words sitting straight on the line. Safe home now counts. Two wrong estates still counts. Being put in by other people does not, and neither does being found asleep on a wall, though the report card for that one is funnier.

Everything is saved on your own device rather than to a server, which keeps the leaderboard your own runs instead of a global one. Pubs remember you between visits and greet you accordingly, badges are petty and hyper-specific, a bad ending seeds town gossip that greets you next time, and Legacy Mode makes barrings permanent across every future run. One Daily Pub gets a modifier each real-world day, seeded from the date so it is the same for everyone.