Winkeltje: The Little Shop Reviews

This reminds me of runescape - really good game to wind down to and just sit and play for hours

Really fun game, and its 100% come a long way since launch. Put 120 hours into making multiple shops, and now they have added staff it brings so much life to your enterprise

I don't really understand negative reviews. Like, what did you expect from such type of a game? It's well impletemented. A lot of content, it's all similar, whole gameplay loop is very repetitive, but it's a genre problem. Completed for 100% achievements, opened even not all the content for 35h. It wasn't VERY fun from the beginning, but still did not become boring after 10, 20 and even 30h [h3]Cons[/h3] - Few little bugs - No more than 1 floor - Strict income cap of 3-4k per day, no more scale options - Tiny limit of workers which are almost useless [h3]Pros[/h3] + Large amount of decorations, especially season, event decorations + Possibility to gridless placement + Free walls/floors decorations (it's honest coz it doesn't affect shop rating) + A lot of recipes, profession progression + A lot of quests, even if it's similar + Events highly affecting economy adding some fresh air to the game I would save ~5-8h if found out that I can skip days by closing shop earlier :C

Very well put together game. It's a great game to play with your partner, as you can run your own shops, try your own things and enjoy watching how the other has decorated his/her shop and how it grows. It's also very satisfying to improve your item qualities all the time; especially for the commissions. The devs are still active in it which is great. For 15 euros, it can give you 20, 30 or more hours of cozy game play over several weekends. :)

Neat concept for a relaxing, whimsical game... but poor execution. The game simply does not hold the player's attention. I have played plenty of builder/management games to know when something is enjoyable and this is not it. Winkeltje has a pleasant art style and didn't give me any performance issues, but the soundtrack is annoyingly repetitive and there is nothing for the player to do except grid away toward the next level to unlock the next currency sink.

The overarching description for this game is: cozy. It's not too long, has a great foundation, and an addictive quality to it. I do recommend buying the game on a sale. It's suited for children who've learned currency and percentages. I imagine it's a good place to start learning/practicing budgeting if you're using gamification as education. If you rely on the concept of "buy low, sell high", it's simple even on the most difficult setting. I do have a couple of constructive criticisms. First, there's a lot of clicking involved; if you want to craft 100 of something, the only way to do it is the click your mouse or the key on the keyboard 100 times. For those with arthritis, this can be painful. Second, there are keys to increase and decrease how much you want to craft but you have to use your mouse to click on the craft button. How come there's not a keyboard key to craft the item as well? Third, there's no sandbox play; once the scenario is completed, that save is over and you can't play it any more (on that note, if you're just starting out on the game, there's an option for a tutorial in the generic game start but not the unique scenarios such as Winterfest). I don't think any more work is being done on the game, but if it were, I'd like to see more added to the back end of the shop so the shopkeeper could self source more: the only way to get meat and wool right now, for example, is to buy it. Being able to raise sheep would be grand. Overall a cozy game, I recommend it if you buy it on sale.

Quite addicting even if it's repetitive. Started a bunch of different saves and it always gets fun when you start to grow your shop and can customize it better though I wish there were more items in game. Overall still a good game, got it on sale so it's even more worth it. Some achievements are quite grindy but it's worth doing (for me) anyway.

Very well put together game. I don't really have any real complaints other than wanting more content. Maaaaybe I have one complaint - I would like to have an option to speed up time somehow. It is not a problem in regular gameplay, but when I was trying to finish the achievements it got a little boring. I "won" the game on very hard by the end of autumn - I had enough money to pay the debt. But I needed to play through the entire winter to finish it for the achievement. So if you want all achievements and don't want to have this issue - start on very hard. It is not very hard at all. Other than that, great little game.

Created by a Dutch studio, [b]Winkeltje: The Little Shop[/b] is a third-person fantasy-themed shop management game with a customizable character, light crafting, and a flexible decorating/building system. While many gamers will love this title (see "Recommendation" section below for the tldr), I'm kind of salty about it. [h3]Story[/h3] In a medieval-fantasy world where iron nails are the size of railroad spikes and alchemists brew health potions, you attempt to pay off your family's debt by expanding your convenience store. [h3]Gameplay[/h3] Days pass and seasons change as you run your little store. You start a new day by clicking the doors, and spend a few minutes strategically stocking your shelves and apologizing when customers want things you don't have. If you display items from the same categories for consecutive days, your shop will "specialize" in that category, meaning that customers are more likely to ask for and purchase similar items. Your shop gains levels as you make sales; each level unlocks new decoration items, and every (5) levels unlocks a new crafting station. Crafting and farming are pretty weak, so - especially in early game - you purchase most of your wares either from your desk before opening (higher prices, full inventory, slower delivery) or from travelling merchants during shop hours (fluctuating prices and inventory, instant delivery). Random events such as bandits can drive costs up for a bit and, while you can adjust your shop, your customers don't care whether you're selling at a loss or profit; they'll buy an apple for <$10 or not at all. This microscopic economy is the deepest mechanic in the game. You can eventually hire shop assistants, but the AI is... programmed to behave like your slacker coworker. They mostly mill around, wasting time and money, and you end up doing the lion's share of the work anyway. [h3]Review[/h3] As an avid fan of management games and decorating, I was excited to finally get my raccoon paws on [b]Winkeltje[/b] -- but it wasn't a good fit for me. Like so many other "cozy" titles released after ACNH, [b]Winkeltje[/b] feels overly simple and repetitive, and its play time is heavily padded by the need to unlock crafting stations and cosmetic items (including character customization options). I tried to get into the gameplay loop, even had some fun maximizing profits and inventory, but running the shop each day was so repetitive that it quickly started to feel like a chore. Crafting was also lackluster: farming was scarcely more than watering some seeds, and purchasing iron bars to forge into nails proved to be a terrible investment. When I started replying to work emails after-hours because I didn't want to start another day in-game, I returned this. The building and buy modes were reasonably easy to use and intuitive; it takes a moment to get the hang of placing new doors, but you can build and place decor with relative freedom once you have the funds. I liked that it becomes progressively more expensive to expand your shop. I was impressed by the sheer number of decor items you can unlock if you stick with the game, and continue to be impressed by the shops posted to the Community Page. Unfortunately, while I don't mind grinding to decorate, I need the grind to be fun. [h3]Recommendation[/h3] I recommend [b]Winkeltje[/b] to players who enjoy decorating and repetitive tasks, especially if you want to do a little management but don't want to deal with any fiddly or detailed systems. If you don't mind grinding for a few hours to design the fantasy shop of your dreams, maybe with a DLC cat by your side, then this is absolutely worth checking out. If you're looking for varied gameplay or a real sense of progression, or if you're not particularly patient, then I would recommend skipping this one or waiting for a steep sale. [quote][b]Follow [u][url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/45365863/]Eekz Today[/url][/u] for more crafting, life sim, management, puzzle, and story-rich recommendations.[/b][/quote]

Cute game, lots of things that are really great, but also so many things that I don't understand why they still haven't been changed or finetuned. And don't get me wrong, for the price it's actually a pretty good game. It just could be so much better. Now I'm giving up because it's getting tedious and frustrating and repetitive. But with some changes I think the playtime people get out of it could be improved. TLDR: Money is difficult to get, getting more tiles gets ridiculously expensive, the game feels restrictive and limited, there's almost no statistics to check what to improve and partly the game is pointed towards luck with merchants and what they bring because there's no other way to get better quality products it seems. - Money is a PAIN to get. I followed all the advice online, added as much appeal as I can (which should mean more customers. So, where are said customers?) Only buy from merchants with a big discount, craft as much as I can myself, have a big garden to grow whatever I can... But I still make a profit of only 2000-3000 a day. - When hiring employees, when you improve your level as employer you get better talents. Well, said talents cost an arm and a leg while once they reach level 10 they're not any better than the cheap employees as far as I can tell. And you level up as employer which means you get less and less cheap employees. - The cost of buying more tiles is seriously ridiculous. I'm now at a point where I pay about 3000 for 1 single extra tile. And it only goes further up. And since I still haven't figured out how to make a decent profit, I now have to have the shop open for 2 days just to buy a single more tile to make the shop bigger. WHY?? - There aren't many statistics in the game so it's tricky to see where you're going wrong and what you should improve. I'd love to know how many customers I got in a day, how many customers couldn't find something so left without buying it, how many of which product I sold, what I spend my money on in the last week or so... - A calendar would be nice to look further ahead to see which events are coming up. - So, it's great that I can do assignments for other merchants. It's not so great that even those are heavily restricted so that you do 1 assignment and then you have to wait 4 days to do another one. Makes no sense and is just annoying. - I can grow vegetables, but to me it makes no sense that I can't grow apples, mandrake, sage and all those things. Why can I not get cows to get my own cheese? I'd love to be more self-sufficient. - Following on that, I don't understand how to get better quality products. For the products I can grow myself it's easy, buy yellow quality seeds, grow them a lot and eventually you get yellow quality veggies. But what about other products? Is the only way to be lucky and have a merchant come by to sell some? If a merchant does have yellow quality, he usually only has like 5 - 7 of those products. Not a lot. And if I'd want to craft better quality products the way I understand it is I need good quality resources. So, where do I get those? Is it just a matter of luck? - I want to be able to post my own assignments. I had to wait 2 seasons before I finally got a merchant coming by with yellow quality grain seeds. I don't see why I have to be completely depending on luck and chance of a merchant coming by. - I can't see anywhere what I need to do to unlock things. I want to unlock the pretty dress but so far, no luck with that. And I have no idea when it'll happen. I have no idea which furniture I could still get later, no idea if there's more to unlock and how to do that. - Recolors of some things would be great. This is ofc not a requirement but it personally annoys me how the wood colors are different and if I like 1 color better but another design, there's no way to combine the 2. - You'd say that a shop should have a way to have stock. As in, to have multiple items of the same product in the shop. And yes, this is indeed possible, but takes up a lot of space. I'd love to have more options that take less space but still have more item slots. A maximum of 6 just feels so limited and restricted. - The amount of storage space you need is absolutely nuts. You want a big warehouse because 1: you can only have a couple per item in the shop itself because it takes so much space and 2: you're depending on merchants and when they offer a discount so better to stock up when you can. I keep adding and it's just never enough. I think I'm on like 2200 stock space and still sometimes feel like I need more. - You have to pay off the debt and there is no way to see how much that is and no way to pay it back any faster than having to wait. I'd love to see the total number and then decide myself how much to pay each day, but instead the game decides you get for example 4 days and then you need to pay 500. Considering you need to do this 20 times before the debt is paid, it takes forever- and ever- and ever... With no way to speed up the process. - After a while things feel repetitive. I don't know which things I can still unlock and what to do for that so I can't work towards a goal. I want to buy more floor tiles but they're so expensive that I just get annoyed every time I buy 1. I can't open the shop and have it kind of run in the background because I have to check merchants and sell things. I want to build the shop more pretty but it's just too expensive. So, I open the shop, click the merchants, sell the things that are not in the cabinets anymore to the customers and then when the shop closes water the plants, craft anything that needs and rinse - repeat. And all to get more floor tiles which I desperately need but are too expensive. Overall, I actually love the atmosphere, the items and I have to give it to them, whatever is in the game works well. I haven't really had many bugs, game seems to be optimized and no characters getting stuck or anything. It just feels all so restrictive and limited and like they want to stop you from growing bigger and earning more. Which sounds like it should be the whole point of the game.