Dwarf Shop

Was looking for a good shop keeping management sim, found a pointless badly designed clicker instead. Between the clunky interface, complete lack of automation of production lines, and automation of the only aspect of the game that might have been fun to do manually (the dungeon delving), this game manages to be both a shallow failure state-void snore fest and a hectic and ultimately futile click fest to try and keep yourself from floating a billion resources and achieve the satisfying illusion of being a competent shopkeeper. Pretty much the only way to challenge yourself is to try and speed run the game, which just ain't a thing I'm into. Got bored in less than an hour and requested my refund.

I can't even recommend this game for fans of clicker games because of the impossibly clunky interface. Selling anything in this game requires you to click buttons, open/close windows, drag items and type in your desired sell price for a total of at least 8 manual operations PER ITEM from the point of crafting to the point of sell, and that's in the optimal case where you're not bouncing back and forth several crafting windows at once trying to be efficient with you micro management, and when you know what your target price should be, which differs according to item, item rarity and the stats of your vendors. Seriously, as someone who finds satisfaction in perfecting a manufacturing process, this almost drove me crazy. Most other clickers get ♥♥♥♥ done in one or two clicks. That's pretty much the point of the whole genre. Each Click = Instant Satisfaction. So as a clicker game, this game is a failure in basic design, and as a management game, it lacks the depth required to make it worthwhile, and as BOTH, its bogged down by the terribly inefficient interface and tedious manual labour you're required to do to achieve each individual bit of progression. No thanks!

A neat little game, with a tentative thumb's up.

The good

[*] It does what it promises on the box - it's a li'l casual pixel game about upgrading your Dwarf Shop whilst mining and selling
[*] Contains mild humour
[*] There are some interesting choices to be made. Do you sell your crafted items, or put them on your dwarves to improve their stats? Who do you prioritise - your miner or crafters?
[*] Rarity of items & different stats makes for interesting comparisons between what gear to use - and on which dwarf.
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The Mediocre

[*] The game gets a bit monotonous. One would have hoped for wider branching decision trees or more conflicts of interest. Instead, you just retreat from mining when you get low on health and craft whatever is available to craft.
[*] The 'bartering' system basically means: put down a high price tag and adjust it down until it sells. Any following items will also sell at that price.
[*] You need to be at the wheel for the game to progress. You can't tab out to let the miner heal or finish crafting. For such a casual game, that seems a bit restrictive.
[*] You unlock the other dwarf salespeople relatively easily, but... (see below)
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The Bad

[*] Unlocking extra dwarves does nothing for several levels as you don't get the right resources yet.
[*] Unlocking extra recipes does very little when you don't ever get the resources you need to craft those items.
[*] Limited inventory space means you are constantly binning items, as you stockpile certain resources in far vaster quantities than you can get rid of them.
[*] Selecting the 'for sale' button is finicky and if you're not careful when adjusting a price, a rare craft you would normally sell for $1000 sells for $9... because the game didn't bother waiting for you to finish putting in the full price of $999.
[*] Quests are not aligned to level progress. By the time you finish the first few mines, your next quest is to farm Earth Tier 2... which doesn't show up for at least the next 10 levels. If ever. (I wouldn't know - not having run into it by shop level 18.)
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Fortunately, these points do not stop you from progressing. It just clutters up your game. It is, however, a bit frustrating to see a bunch of new items (such as new armour) you can't craft to progress more quickly with your mining - simply because you never get the associated resources.

Bottomline

Truth be told, a lot of my gripes just feel like shoddy playtesting. They should be easy enough to adjust. Same with the visual bug where customers walk off with giant pixelated items.

I bought the game at full price and I think it's not a bad buy at that cost (if barely). About 5 euros would probably be a fairer price in its current state, but I can see the issues mentioned above remedied easily enough.

Please see my curator page for more games that are worth your time

Approximate amount of time to 100%: 8h
Estimated achievement difficulty: 2/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 1
Has it been in a bundle: No
Is there a good guide available: You don't need a guide
How many people have completed this game at the time I'm writing this review: 1 on Astats

Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: No
Grinding Achievements: Yes, selling 1k items feels like a grind
DLC-Only achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: No difficulty option
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No

I enjoyed this shop simulator game a lot. You have one worker whom you send to caves the get ingredients and with those ingredients, you'll make items that you can sell in your shop. You try to find the right price, so you don't lose too much money but also sell the items. I ended up with the basic white (lowest quality) items for a little less than 2 times the gold it costs to make them and raised the price little by little with each quality level. What I loved the most, is that you can make most equipment with ingredients from just 1 dungeon. Just a few times I needed an item from another dungeon.

In the days after this game released, there were a lot of updates. Especially the QoL update was very nice; I especially love the bigger inventory. That was a bit of a struggle while I was going for 100% but that shouldn't be a struggle anymore.

Most of the achievements were very easy to get, just by progressing in the game. There are no missable ones and the only grindy one is selling 1000 items. For this, I sent the miner to the lowest dungeon, because those items were the easiest to make.