REVIEW
Written byMizuni
I was just going to test the game, and before I knew it, it was already 5 AM...
This is the kind of game where you tell yourself "just one more day," and before you know it, you start questioning whether you should go to bed, but end up playing another day in the game anyway.
Using a structure similar to Papers, Please, but with constant progression, turned out to be a stroke of genius.
Anyway, let's get into what the game is about:
You're the owner of a shop in the lower districts of a cyberpunk city, and you have to buy and sell products to make a profit, pay your rent, upgrade your shop, and eventually buy the property so you no longer have to pay rent.
To achieve this, the game is packed with systems:
Reputation with different customer factions: lower class, upper class, revolutionaries, police, and the black market.
Tetris-style inventory system, similar to the briefcase in Resident Evil 4, with several ways to expand your storage space.
Contraband and stolen goods system, where the police will start keeping an eye on you if you sell too many illegal products. Also, certain customers won't accept these items.
Unique customers, each with their own little story that develops as they keep visiting your shop. In some cases, you can even influence their fate.
Machines that help you create or modify items, and most of these machines can be upgraded in different ways, either through modification chips or by using materials to improve the machines directly.
Fake and expired items system, where people try to sell you items claiming they're legitimate, but it's up to you to inspect them and identify whether they're fake so you can buy them at a lower price.
And the most interesting part is that many items have their own unique mechanics. For example:
Water: Every water item has different purity levels, and you can use various methods to purify it and measure its purity, increasing its selling price.
Fish: Each fish requires different food, has different growth times, and some fish produce additional items besides meat when you harvest them.
Weapons: Each weapon has several modification slots, allowing you to attach things like scopes, suppressors, magazines, and more to increase their value or reach certain levels of power, accuracy, style, stability, and other stats, especially when a customer requests a customized weapon.
Wine: The quality of wine can change dramatically depending on the grapes, water, and fermentation materials used, and its value increases with each passing day.
And many others that I haven't even properly explored yet, like the chemical system for producing drugs and other products.
And that's not even mentioning all the other systems.
It's the kind of game where you can spend an entire playthrough trying to max out your shop as much as possible, start new playthroughs with different challenges, or even try specializing in certain products.
Because of this, a game that might normally take around 20–30 hours can easily turn into 60–100 hours, especially considering Steam Workshop support, with the community already creating improvements and additional content.
I'm really hoping that over the next few months, the devs keep adding more items with distinct mechanics and, most importantly, more unique NPCs, because they're surprisingly memorable. I often found myself wondering when a certain character would come back to my shop, just so I could see how their story would unfold.
— Mizuni / Noobsnoplay