Pixel Shopkeeper

The game has been completely abandoned by the dev, I played the entire game in 12 hours, took a few years off, came back and saw there were no updates on the game for 5 years other than adding 1 achievement...... thanks bud.

It was fun at first, but the gameplay in the late game was not fun. It tries to mix things up by making items become invisible and artificially making enemies strong with no real way for you to fight back. It doesn't even offer powerful late-game weapons or armor. It's just mediocre.

Unique concept and well executed. I like it. 7/10

At the surface it seems like a pretty chill and casual shopkeeping simulator. However, there are a handful of elements that will test your reaction speed and/or tactical and strategic planning to make things more challenging: [list] [*]Microing the looting aspect of dungeon crawling is key to maximizing the items you get as it goes quite fast. [*]Trying to keep up with attracting customers while grabbing the free items from other NPCs can get hectic. [*]Takes a bit of thought to plan out when to spend money on recipes, player stats, shop items, or shop upgrades. [*]Deciding on when sell loot vs. farm more loot such that you can make the payment each week. [*]Knowing when to sacrifice loot for a stat boost vs. keep it for money. [/list] Overall still a pretty good shop management game.

I want to like it but it's a QOL nightmare. Navigation is tedious and it feels like a game that makes you do everything "the hard way." Menus get painful the larger they are as you unlock or acquire more things. There's no sort features outside of items as weapons, armor, or other. Dungeons make items disappear quickly which feels hectic and unfun when you're trying to puzzle out how to fit all of the loot. It's ideal to click on each passing customer, every tumbleweed, every bird, and polish items before they're sold but none of that is fun. If you want to be a shopkeeper, you want to haggle instead of have NPCs pass through like a conveyor belt with minimal interaction and either purchase or walk off. If you want to see numbers go up, there are many clicker/idle games that do that, or automation games like Factorio. It's not a bad idea but I can't give this a thumbs-up when the execution is this painful.

The music in this game is good and I really like the puzzle-style inventory. However, the gameplay loop is just boring. I note that the store page for this game does specify "As a simulation game it might start out slow as you build yourself up, so if you are bored easily, this might be important"... this rubs me the wrong way tbh. I shouldn't have to suffer through a boring start of the game to get to the fun part, make the start of your game fun.