Discounty

Après avoir joué à la démo et regarder quelques avis. Je pensais avoir trouvé un "cozy game" où le rôle fermier est remplacé par celui de commerçant. Grosse déception... Le jeu est linéaire au possible, aucune réelle interaction avec les habitants, aucun choix impactant, aucune autonomie. On ne peux même pas choisir d'ouvrir ou non son magasin ! On est automatiquement téléporté dedans quelques minutes après l'heure d'ouverture et on doit attendre l'heure de fermeture pour pouvoir le quitter... "Chercherez-vous les profits à tout prix, ou le bonheur de tous les Blomkestiens ?" Tu parles ! On suit l'histoire sans avoir son mot à dire, sans pouvoir faire grand choses autres que d'enchaîner les "missions" peu intéressantes. Le magasin, qui est pourtant présenté comme l'élément central finit par devenir un prison où on va "travailler" sans autre but que d'attendre de pouvoir en sortir.

A really fun shop management game with a weird story and a frustrating late game. Actual play time is 30 hours, I left the game on overnight a few times by accident. +++ The core gameplay loop is very fun. Run your store, manage stock and advertising, run around town solving crises. ++ Decent music and good art. -- The story is... Weird. I don't hate it. Everyone is a selfish jerk destroying the environment, including the MC. You don't get a choice to be a good guy until very very late in the game. -- The selection and highlighting on gamepad was finicky and frustrating. I kept selecting things I didn't mean to. God help you when the sheep invade and you fill up your inventory while trying to select each sheep. --- Many problems are never solved in this game. You cannot have a store that sells 1 of every item without running out of space or micromanaging. You can't have trade partner items delivered to you, so you either have to stock a huge amount in the basement, or constantly run around town buying replenishments. When the scanner breaks your entire shop will just fail to function late game, it's impossible to sell 100 items by looking up prices manually. There's no way you have time to fulfill online orders while managing stock and wiping up messes and checking out customers. The awkward layout required to make optional use of space and storage while maintaining high attractiveness from boosters is fun at first but frustrating at the end. It feels like you're just left with a host of unsolvable problems, like the upgrades just "stop" at some point and you can never make a perfect store, which is really frustrating. Devs, if you're reading this, the solution is really simple. Upgrade to increase warehouse box capacity to 50x then 100x per box. Upgrade so the storefront shelves double in capacity each (even the fancy shelves). Upgrade to never have each bad random event (scanner break, sheep, a/c, rush, muddy feet, etc). Upgrade so that your employee restocks all the shelves overnight. Upgrade so that you can order vendor items via truck. Upgrade so that the enhancers range is boosted 2x or even 3–5x. Upgrade to hire another employee janitor or checkout clerk. Transition into a managerial role once the store becomes extremely successful. Why am I still sprinting around mopping the floor when earning 10k per day? I still recommend this game because it was really fun, but it really annoyed me at the end and it feels so easily fixable.