The Shopkeeper

Point-and-click story game. You are a young man with a business that is in trouble, and you're trying to get help from your mother-in-law. Toward this end you're visiting an antique shop looking for a gift to put her in a good mood. The shopkeeper has a story to tell about every single item in his shop. After examining an item, talk with the mother-in-law to attempt to persuade her. An interesting concept with annoying execution. You will wind up doing the same sequence over and over and over and over again: walk into shop, hear story about item, walk into mother-in-law's office, pick item in room to discuss, have conversation, more often than not get turned down. The conversations can be skipped through, but they're still lengthy. Charting the different conversation paths alone isn't sufficient to get a successful outcome. I eventually found a walkthrough to explain what I had to do to get what. I kept asking myself, "Why is this necessary?" The stories the shopkeeper has for the items, and the suggestion of his own backstory, are intriguing, but hearing one involves the entire sequence of events. Why can't the guy just stand there and find out about each and every item? If for whatever reason he's not going to ask about an item, why must he go to the shop at all each iteration? And why involve the florist? Some people have compared the game to [I]Groundhog Day[/I]. I disagree. Part of the fun with Groundhog Day was seeing the poor sap dealing with having to go through his day over and over again. In this case, the player is the poor sap; the people in the game seem just fine. Perhaps this is artistic intent, and therefore fiendishly effective; all things considered, though, if I want recreational frustrating repetition I'll go play Getting Over It. I got it through HB. I only recommend it if you can get it for almost free.

(game not complete at .3 hours of gameplay and oh god I'm glad it's over, part of my review all my games effort) (short version) Getting ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ at simulator. On a serious note though, imagine that you woke up in a friends body, after they forgot to buy something that their partner very strongly stressed they get at the store, and now you can't get it for three days due to a holiday and it's desperately needed. That's what you'll experience playing this game. Non-stop being aggressively complained at. So if that's your deal, $3 should be a bargain.

A little bit of TLC would have gone a long way for this game. A few more dialogue options and a bit more variation would have really lifted it up. 5/10.

Its like playing a version of groundhog day where you watch a man get belittled by his mother in law over and over again, slowly dying inside only to wonder whats this all for, whats it all about. Well i think i have the answer finally and its this... Its a waste of time go do something better than play this.

2/10

Wirklich hübscher Zeichenstil, aber ein viel zu kurzes Vergnügen. Würde ich deshalb nicht ausserhalb eines Spiele Bundles mitnehmen.

I'm sorry, but this game feels like either there is no actual ending, or it was executed very poorly so that hardly anyone can figure out the exact sequence to progress or gain any further story. I can love games with rewinding features, as long as it actually reveals more depthy beneath it. This did not provide any depth whatsoever and was quite boring after 5 minutes. I will say though, the structure of the game is a foot in the right direction. I can appreciate the hand-drawn art and graphics, and the voiceovers. These are excellent qualities for any game, of any genre. I hope that the developer makes a better game next time and learn from their mistakes.

It's easy to farm this game for achievements, but honestly there's no point to it otherwise. Extremely boring dialogue, complete lack of story or motivation, and repetitive use of scenery. No joke, I believe there are only six location frames and four characters for this entire game. The game just starts, you click on an object in an antique store, you hear a boring description, and then you have a boring conversation using the same few lines of dialogue. Repeat that like a dozen times, and you get all the achievements.

Tags: Adventure - P&C - Point&Click Additional Tags: Delete Local Content & Remove from Library TLDR: Low ambitions, narratively deficient game with ill designed mechanics and akward flow. This is a game in which a customer comes in a small antiques shop. Through clicking pre-determined hotspots, you may blurb a line which will trigger an instance dialogue-based puzzle. Solving through the puzzle basically changes the history/story of the piece, which in turn will affect customer reaction. The game recycles the customer sprite to populate the reaccounting of the item's tale story instance, which confuses things even further. Additionally the game returns very little feedback and loops on itself at odd and sometimes different moments. The underlying scripting is hard to pinpoint but the effects it produces are clearly flavorless and disjointed. The voice acting is amateur and there is next to no sound signature to the game, with an absence of music and very few sound effects. In some instances the dialogue seems to fail and the customer wastes time going to other shops before the game loops again, in other instances the customer comes back to look at a different piece yet the same dialogue puzzle loops again which feels like this game's equivalent to a game over screen. This quickly becomes a tiresome waste of time.

Could not get into it. Seemed all over the place. And the voice acting was grating.