Medieval Shopkeeper Simulator

Review

Play as a medieval shopkeeper; setup your own stall, craft, sell and haggle your way through this medieval world as you thrive to expand your ever-growing business.

Upon starting the game you’ll go through the character creation where you’ll customise your character. You can either do this the easy way and just hit the random choice option or put a small amount of effort into creating your own character.  You have the options to choose skin colour, hair style, hair colour, initial clothing and clothes colour. Once done its time to enter a name for your character and if you can’t think of a name then there’s a random name generator to help you out. You can also mention your favourite thing and leave a little something about yourself, so that others within the realm may get to know something about you.

At the moment you can only start the game as a human, but I think this could change later on in development of the game.  You are also able to have a choice of one of four pets available right now; the choice of pets is chicken, dog, cat or rabbit. You can choose the colour of your pet and name it, after which you’re on to the tutorial.  Once you’re done with the tutorial, it’s time to start earning some pennies.

You have a quaint little home with a bed, table, a couple of wooden barrels, a dresser and inventory box etc, and outside you’ll find your new stall on the edge of your garden.  Around your garden you’ll find four more places (marked with a circle) where you can build work-kits for crafting.  Each work-kit will allow you to craft or do different things; the cooking work-kit, for example, will allow you to cook raw meats or make meals from any recipes you may come across, while the furnace will allow you to smelt items.  There are five different work-kits in total: Furnace, Cooking, Wizard, Gear and Farm.  To craft any of these work-kits you’ll need to have a base work-kit and certain other items. You can only craft so many times per work-kit before you’ll have to craft another.

Around the garden you’ll find plants, flowers, rocks etc, all of which can be collected, stored and used in crafting.  Each new day will refresh your garden, so there’s always something available to you to craft and sell. As you craft items you’ll level up on your work-kits; the more you use them, the more you level up, allowing you to craft more and more as your levels grow. If you need an item that you don’t have, you’re able to either go and search the village for someone selling what you need, or you can order the item and have it delivered to your door.

To order anything, you first must have them in your merchant book on the warehouse page.   Say you wanted some logs - you’d click on the logs and then choose how many you’d like to order;  it will then tell you the current price for the logs you want,  and if you’re happy with them, you just hit the place order button and they’ll get delivered to your door in the next day or so.  The merchant book also keeps information on all the items you’ve already discovered, and how many of each item you may have.  It lets you know about any stalls you have, any taxes owed, any contracts you have taken out, the current king and information on you.

In your merchant book on the warehouse page you can select an item you’d like to price, and the item will then show on the item info page opposite. There you’ll be able to enter the price you’d like to sell an item at.  Pricing will have an affect on customer reactions; if prices are too high, they won’t be happy, but if they’re reasonable or even cheaper than elsewhere, you’ll fare much better.  Now it’s time to sell your wares.  To do this, you have to open your stall to the public; there’s no set time as to when and how long you stay open for, but you are restricted to a certain number of customers per day, which does increase over time.  You can see how many customers you’re allowed to have per day on the back of the open sign.

Put some of your wares on the stall for all to see, and they’ll show how many and how much they are.  There’s enough space for about six things on the stall, but to start with you’re only allowed to use three of these spaces; levelling up will open more slots.  Once your stall is open your customers will start calling.  A bell will ring when you have a new customer; click on the customer and you’ll see the offer they are making.  You’ll also see a selection of actions which you can choose from to interact with the customers, such as talk, give as a gift, wait, don’t give item, come another day, want more items, show displayed items, accept, don’t trade or haggle.

While talking to a customer, you have a couple of options - you can find out information (like the latest price of something), or you maybe lucky enough to receive something like a recipe, which you can then learn and craft in order to sell the new recipe.  Alternatively, you could on-sell the recipe itself for a nice little bonus. Once you’ve used an action such as talk, you can’t use it again on the same customer.  Be warned, each customer only has a certain amount of time before they leave, so getting a deal done quickly is a must.  They may also ask for things which you don’t have on your stall but do have in your warehouse.  If this is the case then you’ll have to run in to your home to grab the items needed (items can’t be taken out of the warehouse while outside), then get back and hand them over before the customer moves on. There is an upgrade where you can have a chest beside your stall to save time on you running back n forth. Once you’ve exhausted all the allotted customers, your stall will automatically close for the day. You’re now left to go and do anything you like; maybe check out the other sellers, look around for any contracts for some extra money, or something else.  When you’re done for the day and it’s time to get some much-needed beauty sleep (not all of us need it), crawl in to bed and save the game.  After the game has saved, a wonderful new day begins.

In the Options you’ll find Controls, Video (Quality, AA, Shadows, FOV, Resolution, etc) User interface (UI Scale), Visuals (Camera Smooth, Fly Mode, Character Speed, Head Bob), Audio (Music, Sound Effects) and Language.

The game is in “Early Access Alpha Stage,” and as such there’s a lot of stuff missing, a few bugs and problems here and there.

Review written by Piston Smashed™ for Zeepond.com!