The Shopkeeper
Verse Publications
I just finished one game where
you play the same day over and over and now here is another, if not the
same day then the same interaction. It’s an odd little outing, that will
take little of your time or your money.
A pony tailed man walks into a
shop, looking for a present for his mother in law. He asks about an
item, or doesn’t, and gets a story. Another character interaction and a
few dialogue choices later, and you will not likely have an appropriate
gift so will leave the shop.
Then you enter and start again.
There are very few screens and
very few dialogue choices. There appear to be a fair few potential
presents in the shop, and some additional objects in an office, and you
can look into the flower shop in the street. As far as I can tell, it’s
the order in which you do things, or don’t do things, that pushes the
“game” along.
I used the “ “ deliberately just
then. It’s a recurring narrative rather than a game.
I said “as far as I can tell”
deliberately also, as I am not entirely sure that is all there is to it.
It is vague, deliberately so,
and initially appealing because of that. The visual style also appealed
to me, so finding myself in the shop and wondering what I was doing and
supposed to be doing and what was the objective and how was I supposed
to get there got me interested. It just didn’t last very long.
I don’t usually care about the
Steam achievements, but here they provided a goal that kept me at it
longer than I might otherwise. My first achievement was “the annoyed
ending” which indicated (a) I had actually gotten a sort of ending and
(b) there were others. I subsequently got “the uncaring ending”, and was
minded to press on. I eventually triggered something called Shop Dream
which I suspect was the right ending as it was the only thing that led
to additional screens and then the credits rolled, although I was
eventually back in the shop. That was my sixth achievement and came
after about 40 minutes. According to Steam there are still two
achievements to unlock.
The other thing that kept me
going was the potential of a narrative payoff, but it never got there. I
kept thinking that if I stuck at it, it would go somewhere, but it
didn’t really go anywhere other than the additional screens. As a
storyline it teased, primarily because of that vagueness and some
interesting writing. But it ultimately left me feeling like the uncaring
ending.
The stilted and rather
unemotional voice acting didn’t help. It kept everything fairly flat,
and the conversations devoid of any anything apart from the words
themselves.
The Shopkeeper ultimately fails
to deliver very much, but I didn’t dislike it. I won’t go back, but for
$2.99 I don’t regret going.
I played on:
OS: Windows 7
Processor: Intel i7-3820 4GHz
RAM: 12GB Ripjaw DDR3 2133 Mhz
Video card: AMD Radeon HD 7800 2048MB
GameBoomers Review Guidelines
February 2015
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