Holly Potatoes! A Weapon Shop. This one is a variation of shop simulator and management game. Different from what I usually play when I pick up a time management. So it’ll be somehow new experience. Though I’ll be honest with you at first I had a suspicion that this game is rather boring. But after couple of sessions I moved it from “boring” to “okayish”.
Plot. We are a young potato in potato world. We inherit from our grandpa an old run down weapon shop. But there is another co-owner who owns 99.9% of shares agent 46… there will be a lot of this kind jokes. So agent enslaves us, not in a literal sense of it but he forces us to not only restore our shop but also pay him a cut every season. And as we progress through the game our pea brained potato starts to realize that’s something smells fishy in this story, especially when the ghost of legendary smith tells us that our grandpa is not in the world of dead.
Gameplay. Since the main genre of this game is management most of time we will be managing a lot of things. First of all we need blacksmiths. Every blacksmith is a pop reference. We need four of them but at the beginning we will only have three. Why do we need four? Because weapons in this game have four stats and when we craft a weapon four smiths will participate in the process. Those stats are: attack (red), speed (green), accuracy (blue) and magic (yellow). So we need to assign a blacksmith to an appropriate attribute place.
Second. We need resources and ingredients. At first we will buy them at a bazar, but after we unlock the exploration function we can use it to get the ingredients.
We would also need relics and enchantments: First one is for weapon’s research and second for final stat boost when we done forging a weapon. Both relics and enchantments are gathered by the exploration function that can be used on several locations.
Now we can finally forge a weapon. We pick a blueprint and start, and then we look at the weapon’s main attribute. Whatever the highest stat weapon has is the main attribute. While we forging we can look at the progress window in the upper right corner of the screen. There we can also see a first boost section. We pick one that aligns with our weapons main attribute. Another window will pop up and asks us to assign a smith for that boost. We can either ask one of our smiths to do the procedure or higher a freelance smith who has more skill, as you can expect the better smith is the more he will ask for.
Once we crafted a weapon we need to sell it. For that we need to go to the world map and pick the “sell” option. We then need to pick a weapon to sell, pick a smith who would act as a merchant and finally pick a place on the map where we are going to look for customers. It will take a moment but once we find a person who’s interested in our merchandise we need to mind one more thing. If said person can use type of weapon we are trying to sell. You can point your cursor at him and look at his preferences. After that you can finally sell your item. That will also take a moment and during this whole business that smith won’t be available at the shop.
Let’s switch to the world map. There are 6 options there. Bazar option, Sell option, Unlock option, Vacation option, Training option, Explore option. Let me explain those that I didn’t explain yet. Unlock option will unlock more available place in the region. It uses tickets to unlock them, you get more tickets by selling weapons to adventurers.
Vacation. When you blacksmith overworks and gets a sad smiley face you need to send him/her on a vacation to restore his/her morale.
Training. You send you smith there to train, I haven’t figure the whole shtick out yet because smiths will get more skillful on their own by just forging more weapons.
Right just few more things left to mention. You don’t just forge weapons and sell them, you also need to do quests, contracts and most importantly don’t forget to pay salary to your smiths. For new weapon blueprints as I said you need to assign one of the smiths as explorer and send said smith to explore a place there your smith most likely will find couple of relic pieces. After you brought them back you need to assign a smith to research it, once again said smith won’t be available for anything else during the process. At one point you’ll also get a potato wiener dog, not sure what it does but it is cute. Right there is also a customization option for your shop, you know, rugs, curtains etc.
Looks like it’ll cover the basics. This maybe not everyone’s cup of tea but there is fun in this indie game. While I personally think that there are better management games I still think you should try out this one. Maybe you will like all the pop references and silly simple humor it has.
Pretty enough
Forgettable mall ambiance.
