Charm Commerce is one of those games that constantly screams “this has potential,” but almost never reaches it.
The core idea is actually pretty fun:
You run a brothel, hire girls/monster girls with different stats and requirements, manage rooms, morale, hygiene, salaries, customer satisfaction, etc. Customers also have preferences for races and stats, which sounds interesting on paper, but has issues on its own which make it a pointless system, I'll shortly go through that later.
But overall, I weirdly enjoyed parts of it.
The character art is amateurish, but it has charm. It’s simple and rough, yet still visually appealing in its own weird indie way. Sadly, the background art and menus are extremely bland by comparison and feel underdeveloped. The navigation could also be improved a lot by replacing the nested text boxes with an actual illustrated cute little map and clickable nodes! :)
The biggest issue by far is the gameplay and UI design.
The UI is a complete mess and the game explains almost nothing properly. I played for over 3 hours before discovering that workers can be assigned special roles like janitor, guard, manager, etc. The button for it looked like a rename button, so I ignored it the entire time. That mechanic is incredibly important, yet the game basically hides it from the player. There is a small hint about assigning guards to remove bad customers, but no real explanation where to go to find that. For the longest time, I thought it was a specific NPC that I needed to talk to in order to hire guards, but that's so far from the truth, which just caused my first 3 hours to be way more manual than they needed to be, and also made me get a bunch of negative debuffs thrown at me constantly simply because I didn't find that button sooner. From reading other reviews and comments, this seems to be a pretty common issue, so fixing that would be a top priority.
There are tons of little UX issues like this:
- Important information is buried in awkward menus,
- Workers stack on top of each other constantly,
- Misclicks happen nonstop due to constant movement or stacking,
- Customers patience runs out fairly quickly, combined with having a lot of customers coming in consistently, it makes micromanagement frustrating,
- Checking customer preferences against worker stats becomes impossible later on due to the amount of customers that arrive,
- Rooms can only be cleaned manually unless you change a setting, which is an extremely weird thing to implement overall,
- And some systems have almost no visual feedback whatsoever, like rooms getting dirty (they look the same no matter what).
The hygiene system in particular is awful. Rooms become dirty over time, lowering morale and comfort, but the game barely communicates how to deal with it. Once you figure it out, manual cleaning becomes insanely tedious in the late game, especially while handling a constant stream of customers. Switching Hygiene to ‘Auto’ and hiring janitors essentially removes the system entirely, which makes me question why the mechanic exists in the first place. Either you suffer through extremely tedious manual management whilst constantly under time pressure, or you don't see the system whatsoever throughout the entire time playing...
Leveling is also disappointing. Characters gain only 1 stat point per level, while naturally higher-level recruits start with massively better stats anyway. Since leveling is extremely slow for some reason (honestly this just feels bugged), there’s almost no reason to invest in weaker workers long-term. It is way better to just find a high level worker and pay the higher salary than trying to use low-level workers, unless you want to use potions to raise their stats that way, which in the end will probably cost you more in total than the salary for the worker ever will.
The game also suffers from a lot of repetitive clicking and strange design choices:
- Buying resources one piece at a time,
- Traveling through nested text menus instead of an actual map,
- Time management systems that encourage one obvious “optimal” setup, whilst neglecting any other way to play,
- And automation systems that feel half-finished.
What frustrates me most is that almost every bad system feels fixable. With better UI/UX design and more thoughtful balancing, this could genuinely become a really enjoyable management game. This is one of those games that easily make me think "how could I do this better?", and give me my own ideas for what I would've done instead (I understand however that it is always easier to say than do, but I digress).
Right now though, it feels like an early prototype with good ideas but poor execution.
I don’t regret trying it, and I can respect the developer’s effort and artwork, but I can’t really recommend it in its current state unless it’s extremely cheap (a buck).
2/10 currently, but honestly has the potential to become a 7/10 or even 8/10 with major improvements.
TL;DR
Either buy it when it is dirt cheap, or don't buy it at all.
