It's decent enough for me to thumb it up, although it does have its issues. Is this gonna measure up with some of the heavy hitters inside of the store management simulation space? No, but it can be satisfying, at least for a short while. Unfortunately, this does feel like there's a lack of content that keeps it from being great. You upgrade pretty damn fast in this game, and the amount of upgradable things are on the limited side. There's enough here to show you a good time, but not nearly enough get most people to stay long term. For the price, it could be a bit cheaper to reflect its breath of content, but it isn't too egregious.
The aesthetic of the lewdity itself is great. It's all middle aged BBW's, mom bods, boob veins, saggy tits, cellulite, unkempt pubic bushes, and stray anal hairs. From the pulse of generalized norms, this cup of tea is divisive, but for the target audience, this is all pure unconventional beauty wrapped up in some sloppy humor, and I love every bit of this flavor. Depictions of thick middle aged bodies in their most natural unshaven states can be beautiful too. Lean stake dinners are great, but sometimes you just want a sloppy Big Mac loaded with grease. You don't see this type of flavor very often on Steam, so for the devs willingness to go there, I have to at least give them their flowers for that. This game has its issues, but the art style is not one of them. It totally avoids being generic, which is a huge plus, and although limited, what's here is really nicely done. The exaggerated cartoon look of the women sort of reminds me of the art style used in Ren & Stimpy's Adult Party Cartoon, whenever they had animated women on the show. It's absolutely great, but like I said off the top of this, the game is short, so there's not a lot of it, which is a real shame because the art assets look to be thoughtfully crafted by an actual person rather than just being A.I. dumped (although who knows these days) which indicates to me that the dev really did care about what they were making.
As an actual game, the mechanics are all very basic. Basic isn't always bad, but this game does have a heavy reliance on its unorthodox brand of lewdity to carry it through its "basicness" and because there's not a lot here, the price to content ratio becomes hard to not see. The lewdity this went for is pretty great, but because the experience here is so short, it can only be carried so far by that. The biggest draw here is the charm of the art, and the intrigue of the next ridiculous hyper sexual thing you're going to unlock. If this game had more upgrades with more content unlocks, it would have been a much stronger recommend. Particularly, I would have liked to have seen a wider variety of standee's and statues that can be placed around the store.
As you upgrade the business, the inside and outside of the shop will become more and more decorated as you go, often in rather extravagant ways, even adding in giant statues for you to awe over, which was a very nice touch of detail. Where I complained earlier about not having more statues and standees that the player can manually place, this part of the game makes up for. Still not a replacement by any means, but it's great, although the graphics are on the muddy side when it comes to pretty much all of these assets. I've played other shop simulator games where an upgrade literally just gives your store more space, so I don't want to understate how appreciated the level of detail is here. With these cozy little shop management games, those little details do go a long way.
Honestly, I do really like this game, but the biggest thing that holds it back is that it's shaping up to be a pretty damn short ride for the nearly 10 dollar price tag. For just a bit more money, you can experience some of the best games inside of this space, so this isn't a hard recommendation by any means. And sure, you can technically play this forever, but once you reach max level, which I'm nearly there at 2 and a half hours, you're able to see all there is to see. That's this game's biggest misstep in my opinion. The skeleton is there, it just needed more meat on the bones. I much would have rather have seen this as an early access release knowing that more content was on the way, rather than the full release it currently is as a short game. Because of that, this feels more like a $3.99 - $4.99 experience rather than an $8.99 one. I do like it, but it's one of those things that makes you say to yourself "damn that's a shame". I would have liked to have seen more.
I wish there was a "thumbs in the middle" button that I could click, because that's what I would ideally like to give this game. I get the feeling that Steam doesn't include a button like that because they want people to make committed recommendations, but some things are simply gray, and grayness should have representation. That being said, consider my review of this game to be a thumbs sideways, but tilted up.
Update: I'm four and a half hours in at this point, and I have all the unlocks. The last one is pretty nice, and again, the attention to detail really feels like whoever made this cared about what they were putting into it, but I just wish there was more. I actually reached the end of the content after about 3 hours, but if you follow all the bonus missions and go out of your way to collect the bonus XP that spawns outside of the shop, you can pretty much speed run through it much faster than that.
