A year or so ago, I was privy to a preview of Merchants of Rosewall from developer Big Blue Sky Games. The game was ambitious with different ways the player could build out and run a merchant shop. The backdrop for the game was fascinating, as it went with a more fantasy world, akin to something you would find in Dungeons & Dragons, and was mainly driven by crafting and selling. It was not a bad concept at all.
Since that preview, we hadn’t heard much about the game. We knew it was in active development and it was on the cusp of going gold but we hadn’t seen it since last March. Well, that changed two weeks ago, when Merchants of Rosewall was dropped in our lap for review. What we found was an accurate representation of what we saw in the preview, but we also found some high expectations right from the get-go that may turn players away.
With that silent and somewhat vague description out there, let’s get right into this shop and see what it has to offer.
Story
When I first jumped into Merchants of Rosewall, I wasn’t sure where it would take me outside of running a shop. I didn’t expect a story, nor did I expect the mystery that came with said story. I just expected crafting, selling, and trying to succeed. But it was more than just the latter.
The story has your hero/shopkeeper arrive in Rosewall via an external funding company. That company has wild expectations of what type of sales, and how soon, your shopkeeper should be pulling in. These expectations ignite the need for you to go out and explore Rosewall and learn about the market, its people, and the best place to recruit new assistants in special fields via their guild.
Along the way, you bump into a fountain that you drink out of which leads to memories injected into the mind of the shopkeeper. These memories depict a ruined city from a flood and tragedy untold. As you progress in the game, and meet characters with similar stories, such as an old sailor named Seagull, a mystery starts blooming, and becomes one that you must solve.
While that is a bit less vague, there are still more surprises to be had in the story than what I just dropped. The fact that BBS went this far to make the shopkeeping gameplay a bit deeper with lore and its characters more three-dimensional with development was impressive. The story does hook you with trickle-down details that lead to something bigger, it also makes the gameplay more meaningful and motivating. In a game led by crafting and shopkeeping, sometimes you need a bit more to stand out from other games like this. It does so with its story and it’s a welcomed lore for this game.
Gameplay
Here is the beef with this burrito, folks. While the story is good and it is somewhat the backbone that leads the gameplay, the latter is the most vital when it comes to making a shopkeep/crafting game. The story cannot outshine the complexity of Merchants of Rosewall’s gameplay, and it wants you to know that from the moment you begin crafting. Of course, expectations and goals lead before the crafting even gets started.
Contract
The gameplay’s container comes in the form of requirements from a parent company that is sponsoring your shop. You must meet a financial goal with your shop in a month or risk losing everything. This risk is present with a countdown in the upper-left corner of the screen at the start of the game. For every day you craft and sell things, you must move closer to your monthly goal. Should you not meet that goal, then it is game over for you – and there is no flexibility to it. That game over means you’ll have to find a saved file and hope that you save it at the right time to gain more goal ground, or you simply have to start the game over. Not very reassuring choices for success.
Now, while I love goals and expectations for this game, the beginning presents a lofty goal. Fresh from the tutorial of the game, you’re given a goal to gain$3000 by 30 days and reach level 2 as a merchant. Getting to that goal is tough going, especially since you’re just getting to know how the game works.
During my time with the game, the initial goal was tough at best. If I didn’t bring the right goods, listen to the customer, and go in with nearly flawless execution, then it meant my 30-60 minutes of gameplay was for nothing. The game does its best to encourage and prepare you for the goal but knowing that you’re probably just feeling out the process and are probably going to be far from perfect at the beginning means you’re probably going to fall short. That is discouraging. I think the goals for the contract at the beginning needed to be tamed a bit. Every game not named Dark Souls generally won’t ask for perfection from your performance right out of the gate. Challenges are one thing but asking for this type of high success from players at the start is tough. Merchants of Rosewall kind of shot high with its demands and was unforgiving with its results.
The game does its best to make you feel like you have an out, as it will allow you to pop into a saved file and try again, but if you have saved your game at the moment of your shop’s downward spiral, then you’re just wasting your time crashing into failure again. It’s a bit frustrating, to say the least. My advice for the devs, and I know they asked for it, is to ease up on the player at the beginning. Either dumb down the goals or change the mathematics. Or both. Maybe an update will help? Anyway, the initial contract in the game may stop some players from getting beyond that point, as the gameplay, once things get rolling, is a treat.
Speaking of gameplay…
Selling out
As I stated above, there is some good complexity to this game. It has many moving parts to it that make up a whole. Those parts come in the form of managing your shop, managing employees, making decisions using customer satisfaction/dissatisfaction data, and building out your shop to make it expand and drive up your business. In addition to this, understanding the economy of Rosewall is important, as well as knowing when to shift gears with what and how you’re selling things.
All this complexity is fascinating to see in motion and surprisingly easy once you get over the initial contract hump. This game felt like it was truly a shopkeeping experience that went beyond the typical ho-hum of its gameplay type. And you’ll see, or at the very least detect this from the start.
When you get into Rosewall, the first task is finding a chef who can cook meals that your shop can sell. These meals are driven by ingredients that you can acquire at the local market. Once obtained, you then have your chef prepare them in a location in your shop. The catch at the beginning is that your chef cannot prepare more than one type of meal per day, so choosing the right one is vital for your shop’s success. And choosing the right one stems from what your customers like/want. Just like in real life.
On the employee side of the tracks, you can meet people and hire them based on their skills. For example, the game assigns you a chef and a smith at the beginning. Each one has certain crafting skills that require different market goods to make a product they’re known for concocting. The chef might make noodles, or a steak stir fry, while the smith might make cups, ingots, or various other items smith-related. As the assistants make more and more items, they expand their careers and capabilities, as well as their talents. Those capabilities must meet and greet the demand of the consumer, which you’ll have to keep the pulse of throughout the game.
At the end of each day, you are given stats about how sales were for the day and what customers liked (they leave comments). Taking all that into consideration, you must delve in that direction and hope that your information is correct. The more sales you get with the right products, the more you’re pushing toward the goal the external company has set up for you. It’s a pressure cooker at times with this game, but a fun one regardless.
As for how you sell your goods in your shop, the game gives you some options. You can sell them out in the open, put special items in a display case, or you can expand your shop. The selling concept is a loop, which means you’re going to figure out, eventually, what the best way to present your items is in the game from the success/failure you garnish.
In its entirety, the amount of complexity that went into designing this game is quite impressive. You have a lot of moving pieces and parts, and plenty of pressure to perform, that will keep you locked in and engaged. My main complaint with Merchants of Rosewall is the difficulty arc of the gameplay. I think it’s far too ramped up at the beginning instead of gradually. The uphill battles in any game, this type or not, should always start low to give players a chance to get comfortable with balancing out the game’s demands. There were several times during my initial jumping-off point when I would simply wonder what I was missing to fall short of goals and what I could improve. When you’re limited in the beginning to what you can do and you’re required to do it nearly perfectly, then you’re in for a world of frustrating gameplay to experience.
Just bring it down some, Big Blue Sky. You’ve got a great set of tools in this gameplay, just tame those initial expectations.
Other odds and ends
In addition to the above gameplay, Merchants of Rosewall also features some dialogue and branching choices. While I have yet to see some catastrophe come from a particular choice made while chatting with other characters, it’s nice to see it simply isn’t a visual novel with the occasional gameplay. I like the fact that the devs mixed this with the story and gameplay, as it shows they do care about the player’s experience and adventure.
To help push the story choices and gameplay, the Merchants of Rosewall features some gorgeous art that is pleasant. Even when you’re running the risk of failing, the game’s art calms all nerves/frustration down and gets you back on the ground. The art is solid and worthy of the game’s fantasy backdrop. It’s very pretty.
Equally as nice are the audio and sound effects. The music is mostly background, but it pushes the gameplay nicely along. It matches the visuals with a calm demeanor, even when you’re going to fail. I also appreciated the effort that went into the game’s sound effects, which never get enough praise in games. When you’re in a crowded train station, the crowd noise sells it. When you’re listening to your customers praise or grumble, it’s obvious audibly. Both music and SFX were done well and added to the gameplay value.
Now, having said all this, the game is a bit buggy at times. There were a couple of moments when I was stuck in a dialogue loop. For example, when I went back through the game the second time around, after miserably failing the first outing, my ADHD got the best of me, and I tried to fast-forward through dialogue. At some point early in the game, you must purchase ingredients for recipes you acquire from your external company. I tried to purchase more ingredients than were allowed, which stuck the game in a perpetual “just pick one ingredient” message that I couldn’t break from during gameplay. I was forced to begin again.
There are a few more hiccups in the game, such as using my touchpad on my laptop to progress dialogue and then having that touchpad stop progressing it. I had to use the return key to progress it until the return key lost its purpose, and then I went back to the touchpad. It was manageable but odd. I think a few more updates might do this game well.
On that sweet note, let’s wrap up this review.
Conclusion
Merchants of Rosewall from developer Big Blue Sky Games is a complex take on shopkeeping simulators. It does well to combine storytelling, deep shopkeeping and crafting, and motivating goals to keep the player engaged. While the goals can be lofty and frustrating at times, the game is still fun to play.
