Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale (PC)
Mar. 23rd, 2018 10:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroRecette has a dream of owning and operating her own item shop. Tear is a fairy sent to clean up the massive debts that Recette's shop was saddled with. They team up to try to make the shop a success!
The main mechanics / game flow is that you pay an adventurer to go into a procedurally-generated dungeon and play an action-roguelike item-gathering game. Assuming you survive, you can bring out the 20 items in your inventory and set them up in your shop. Each time period you open the shop, people wander in and pick out things you have on display, and you can haggle over the price. Sell them for a profit, repeat. The only initial hurdle is that you have a set date each week that payment is due to the bank. As you successfully vend items, new mechanics are introduced, like people selling you items or ordering in advance; or being able to redecorate your store or fuse better items to sell. New adventurers and recurring NPC are introduced over time, and a rival storekeeper show up periodically to make your life unpleasant. If you fail to make a payment, you get a game over and the game returns to Day 2—you keep your experience and inventory, but your money is forfeit.
I made it through one month and then was sent back to the beginning of the cycle (which I suspect is intended by the setup). While I like the concept and found the dungeon-crawling engine fun, I found the core haggling mechanic got very tiresome. It's just a high-low guessing game within limited parameters, and it means that no matter how much inventory you have, if you want it to sell for a decent price, you need to go through it over and over. I want an option to label items with prices and just have people willing to pay that price come to the counter! Actually, I kinda want an option to leave Tear in charge of the store so I can run around buying goods wholesale and sending out adventurers to gather cool stuff for me. As it stands, I just get annoyed that the little girl who never wants to pay more than 115% of base price keeps coming in and whining at me when I could have the blacksmith, who'll reliably pay 130%.
(I later learned that despite what the tutorial claims, you should actually be charging less and trying to get an acceptable price on the first go every time, which causes customers' budgets to grow and give you more XP. The game doesn't actually tell you this.)
On that topic, given the large numbers of some goods that you need to fuse most items and the fact you can generally only fit one dungeon crawl into a day, the 20-item backpack and the “unknown ingredients” mechanics are a real pain. Apparently if you gain enough merchant levels you can get 25 and then 30 items, but that's still nowhere near enough to fit all the vendortrash you can collect in just a 5-floor short run.
Overall: As I've hit on a number of times recently, when the core reward of the game is making numbers go up via repetitive actions, you have to actually enjoy those actions. The core haggling mechanic here got tiring for me, and I don't love the plot or characters enough (and I don't crave the dungeon-crawling enough) that it's worth my time. This was close to being a giant time-suck for me, but not quite.
The main mechanics / game flow is that you pay an adventurer to go into a procedurally-generated dungeon and play an action-roguelike item-gathering game. Assuming you survive, you can bring out the 20 items in your inventory and set them up in your shop. Each time period you open the shop, people wander in and pick out things you have on display, and you can haggle over the price. Sell them for a profit, repeat. The only initial hurdle is that you have a set date each week that payment is due to the bank. As you successfully vend items, new mechanics are introduced, like people selling you items or ordering in advance; or being able to redecorate your store or fuse better items to sell. New adventurers and recurring NPC are introduced over time, and a rival storekeeper show up periodically to make your life unpleasant. If you fail to make a payment, you get a game over and the game returns to Day 2—you keep your experience and inventory, but your money is forfeit.
I made it through one month and then was sent back to the beginning of the cycle (which I suspect is intended by the setup). While I like the concept and found the dungeon-crawling engine fun, I found the core haggling mechanic got very tiresome. It's just a high-low guessing game within limited parameters, and it means that no matter how much inventory you have, if you want it to sell for a decent price, you need to go through it over and over. I want an option to label items with prices and just have people willing to pay that price come to the counter! Actually, I kinda want an option to leave Tear in charge of the store so I can run around buying goods wholesale and sending out adventurers to gather cool stuff for me. As it stands, I just get annoyed that the little girl who never wants to pay more than 115% of base price keeps coming in and whining at me when I could have the blacksmith, who'll reliably pay 130%.
(I later learned that despite what the tutorial claims, you should actually be charging less and trying to get an acceptable price on the first go every time, which causes customers' budgets to grow and give you more XP. The game doesn't actually tell you this.)
On that topic, given the large numbers of some goods that you need to fuse most items and the fact you can generally only fit one dungeon crawl into a day, the 20-item backpack and the “unknown ingredients” mechanics are a real pain. Apparently if you gain enough merchant levels you can get 25 and then 30 items, but that's still nowhere near enough to fit all the vendortrash you can collect in just a 5-floor short run.
Overall: As I've hit on a number of times recently, when the core reward of the game is making numbers go up via repetitive actions, you have to actually enjoy those actions. The core haggling mechanic here got tiring for me, and I don't love the plot or characters enough (and I don't crave the dungeon-crawling enough) that it's worth my time. This was close to being a giant time-suck for me, but not quite.
