Winkeltje: The Little Shop
I really enjoyed the hours I spent with this one. It's a shop simulator where you build a shop in a fantasy world, decorate it, and sell items to townspeople each day. It's got a wonderful building system and gives you a lot of freedom over how you design, layout and decorate your shop. You can also buy raw materials and craft items yourself at a forge or alchemy bench etc.
Pros
- Really nice building system - it's very easy to make changes and you get 100% of the money back when you sell furniture, making it easy to upgrade or completely change your design at any time
- Beautiful lighting effects from placed objects (unlike The Tenants!)
- You can craft items instead of just buying them. Your crafting skill increases over time, so making lots of something makes you more profit
- Items have rarity and customers pay more for rare items
- When I started playing, a couple of the low tier items were incredibly similar in border colour (white and grey). I popped onto the Discord and had a conversation with the dev about it, and it was updated shortly afterwards
- Took me a while to realise it, but there's a "restock" button - so you can just tap a key to put back the items that were on a shelf to sell again
- You can later hire an employee to restock shelves for you
- Highly customiseable UI, and in general the UI feels pleasant to use
- There's a commissions board where you need to make / deliver a certain number of items of a certain quality
Cons
- I'd already played for a couple of hours before I realised that you could specialise (it's not mentioned in the tutorial). I was buying one of every item because people wanted all kinds of things. I restarted the game and just sold nails, and ended up specialising in blacksmithing which was a lot more fun
- There's a quest fairly early on that says "Upgrade your maximum appeal in the unlock menu". When you buy the next counter, it increases your max appeal, but the description doesn't say so. When I first got that quest, it wasn't possible to buy that desk so I was very confused.
- If you have a quest to "increase your appeal by placing decorations", you can't progress this if you're at maximum appeal already
- There are events which change what people want (like "harvest" when people want food and bread), which is a good idea in theory for variety, except that the game encourages you to specialise and I have no food for sale in my blacksmith shop
- There are 10 active objectives, but I'm only allowed to see 5 of them at a time
- There's only one background track (per season) for the shop day. Each day is about 2-3 minutes and it starts playing again from the start every day. It gets old pretty quickly
- Every 5 levels you're rewarded with a Crafting Skillpoint, which lets you unlock another crafting station. As above though, the game pretty much forces you to specialise - so once I had my forge, all the other crafting stations were pointless
- It took me 10 hours to realise that crafting was faster when the shop was closed. I could tell it was faster sometimes, but hadn't realised it was at night (so craft lots of something when the shop is closed, don't just keep a couple of spares)
- There's no way to buy things in bulk. If I want 60 iron, I have to click 60 times
- Gets extremely repetitive towards the end