Info about CraftCraft: Fantasy Merchant Simulator:

Official game description:
CraftCraft is made by a small fully indie studio who made Death and Taxes.
✧ Become a jeweler or a smith in a quaint port town.
✧ Create a moth / elf / cat character!
✧ Meet a lot of different folks and impact their lives. Your choices matter!
✧ Have a cute owlcat as a pet.
✧ ❤︎❤︎ Romance ❤︎❤︎
✧ Relax and craft!
✧ Make _shiny_ stuff. ✧ ⋆ ˙
✧ Make even MORE _shiny_ stuff. ⋆ ˙ ✧ + \*  ˙
✧ Make less _shiny_ and more **ominous** stuff. 
Includes:
✧ Full voice acting
✧ Completely unique crafting simulation
✧ Original soundtrack
✧ Short branching story spanning 11 in game days with multiple endings

Release date: 29 May, 2025

Categories: Crafting, Business Simulation, Character Customization, Single-player Story, Multiple Endings, NPC Relationships & Romance, Resource Management, Rhythm Game


- Hardware Profile: No data
Feature extractions:
- Community Price: No data
- Playtime Metrics: No data
- Time-to-fun: No data
- Player Archetypes: No data


Below are summaries of things people say about the game per category.
Each point is assigned a weight that represents how often it is mentioned across all reviews.
What players like:
- Charming, voiced, and diverse characters (weight 0.96): The game features a cast of charming, well-written, and diverse characters that players find engaging and likable. The characters are fully voiced, which adds depth and personality to the game world and enhances the overall experience.
- Unique and engaging crafting system (weight 0.89): The game features a unique and engaging crafting system with rhythm-based mini-games and a high degree of customization. Players can create a variety of items based on customer requests, using foraged materials and accessories to express their creativity.
- Beautiful art style and atmosphere (weight 0.68): The game features a beautiful and immersive art style, complemented by a fitting soundtrack and sound design. The visuals and audio create a cozy and relaxing atmosphere that enhances the overall gameplay experience.
- Fun, relaxing, and enjoyable gameplay (weight 0.6): The game offers a fun, enjoyable, and relaxing gameplay experience with simple mechanics and a satisfying gameplay loop. The game is casual and not too difficult, making it a great way to unwind and pass the time.
- Fantastic character creation system (weight 0.23): The game offers a fantastic character creation system with diverse races, styles, and customization options. Players can adjust their characters to suit their preferences, including options for humanoids, furries, and LGBT themes.
- Responsive and communicative developers (weight 0.18): The developers are responsive to community feedback on Discord and actively fix issues and roll out updates. They are open and communicative, showing their love for the game and dedication to improving the player experience.
- Good story and world-building (weight 0.14): The game has a good story, well-developed characters, and an enjoyable game world. The writing is amazing, making the player feel like a part of the game world.
- Helpful features for player guidance (weight 0.1): The game offers helpful features such as manual saving, autosaves, a task list, and a notebook with color-coded notes. These features enhance the player experience by providing guidance and tracking progress.
- Improved since the demo (weight 0.09): The game has improved since the demo, with problems resolved and mechanics refined based on feedback. The first few hours of gameplay are considered fun and enjoyable.
- LGBTQ+ friendly narrative (weight 0.09): The narrative is LGBTQ+ friendly in its portrayal of characters' backgrounds, with awesome representation of POC and Queer characters. The game is full of heart.

Common complaints:
- Short length; overpriced content (weight 0.91): The game's short length, often around 5-10 hours, feels incomplete and doesn't justify the price. Many reviewers felt the story ended abruptly just as it became engaging, with some comparing it to an early access title or extended demo. The lack of an endless mode or substantial replayability further compounds this issue.
- Frequent crashes; buggy saves (weight 0.68): Numerous bugs and frequent crashes plague the game, leading to lost progress and a generally unpolished experience. The save system is also problematic, often reverting players to the start of customer interactions or even entire days, exacerbating the frustration caused by crashes. These issues make the game feel unfinished and can be game-breaking.
- Tedious, shallow crafting system (weight 0.49): The crafting system is criticized for being repetitive, tedious, and lacking depth. Reviewers mention frustrating minigames, a lack of material options, and unintuitive mechanics. The process feels more like a tutorial than a fully realized crafting experience, with some finding it overly complex and wishing for more fluidity.
- Inconsequential choices; underdeveloped romance (weight 0.43): Choices and romance options feel inconsequential, with limited impact on the story and character development. Many storylines are underdeveloped, and romance options often lead to unsatisfying conclusions or abruptly disappear. The ending feels rushed and leaves many plot threads unresolved, diminishing the overall experience.
- Clunky inventory; poor interface (weight 0.38): The inventory and workbench interfaces are clunky and tedious to use. Reviewers cite issues with limited space, awkward item rotation, difficult drawer manipulation, and a lack of sorting options. These issues make inventory management frustrating and time-consuming.
- Underused, limited scavenging (weight 0.22): The scavenging mechanic feels underused and almost pointless due to limited respawn rates and a lack of clear indication of which areas replenish. The storage system is also lackluster, making desk clutter a problem. This reduces the importance of scavenging and limits the crafting system.
- Inconsistent, clashing art styles (weight 0.17): The game suffers from an inconsistent art style, with clashing item designs and varying texture quality. Some assets appear low-resolution compared to others, detracting from the overall visual appeal. The lack of variety in character customization options is also noted.
- Zooming causes movement bugs (weight 0.12): Zooming in causes movement bugs that can break painstakingly built objects. The hit detection is off after zooming the screen. Rotating and moving things feels clunky. A bug causes crafted items to fly off-screen and disappear if the mouse is moved too quickly in the forging room, forcing players to remake them.
- Softlocks can halt progression (weight 0.11): Reviewers experienced softlocks that required reverting to an autosave and replaying content. Softlocks occurred because the reviewer was requested to craft a sword but lacked the necessary ingots or because they collected all the trash before receiving the quest to do so, preventing them from packing straps into a bag.
- Very linear; limited replayability (weight 0.07): The game is very linear, with customers ordering specific items in a predictable sequence. Replay value is limited due to the fixed story and customer interactions.
- Money is useless (weight 0.06): The in-game currency feels pointless in terms of gameplay, except for paying the daily tax of 20 coins. Gold is only used for daily deductions and purchasing limited bar materials, lacking options for self-improvement.
- Unspecified issues; confusing interaction (weight 0.04): This point is too vague to be useful. It mentions some unspecified issues and a confusing interaction, but lacks specific details.

Gameplay feedback:
- Point-and-click navigation, resource gathering (weight 0.14): The game uses a point-and-click system for navigation and resource gathering, which involves clicking on the map to visit various scenes. Some scenes include hidden object game mechanics or purchasing from merchants. However, the map becomes useless after all items are collected.
- Character customization, impactful choices (weight 0.1): Players can customize their character's appearance and choose a background at the start of the game. These choices impact the lives of the characters you meet and can change things up on a replay.
- Casual-friendly, low difficulty gameplay (weight 0.07): The game is designed to be casual-friendly with low difficulty and mechanically light gameplay. The mini-games are short and not too difficult, making it accessible for a wide range of players.
- Scavenging for low-value materials (weight 0.07): Players can scavenge for materials in various locations, but commissions don't require it and there are no extra benefits for doing so. Additionally, the items found through the garbage collecting mechanic are of very low value.
- Fantasy setting, merchant sim gameplay (weight 0.05): The game is set in a fantasy port city where players run a small shop providing forging, repair, and maintenance services to customers. It is an RPG merchant sim where you meet different people around Windspell.
- Style keywords influence crafting (weight 0.05): Players can use a lens to see style keywords on materials, hinting at a complex system where customer keywords indicate desired proportions in the finished product.
- Short story, time-based progression (weight 0.05): The game's story lasts for approximately two in-game weeks, and time progresses when delivering items to customers.
- Small cost to forging ingots (weight 0.03): There is a small cost to forging ingots (1-3 gold each) to make weapons or armour.
- Balanced and enjoyable smithing (weight 0.03): Smithing and detail work are balanced and enjoyable.
- Replayability through multiple solutions (weight 0.03): The challenges are designed in a way that encourages replaying, as multiple materials and designs can fulfill each one.
- QTEs during order fulfillment (weight 0.03): Players engage in QTEs while fulfilling orders, testing reaction skills.
- Crafting requests, balancing earnings (weight 0.03): You craft customer requests and balance your earnings.
- Newspaper with no business impact (weight 0.03): The game features a newspaper with market news, but it has no impact on your business and changes when save-scumming.
- Chat with customers in tavern (weight 0.03): Players can chat with regular customers in the tavern.

Performance notes:
- Occasional lag spikes (weight 0.03): The game's performance can be inconsistent, with occasional lag spikes. However, the game generally runs well, even on older hardware, suggesting that the lag may be related to specific in-game events or areas rather than overall optimization.

Recommendations:
- Wait for sale/updates (weight 0.76): Many reviewers suggest waiting for a sale, significant updates, or bug fixes before purchasing the game. The game is considered incomplete, buggy, and overpriced for its current content and state. Some reviewers are even refunding the game due to crashing issues.
- Generally positive experience (weight 0.66): Many reviewers recommend the game, praising its fun, relaxing, and immersive qualities. It's considered a good choice for those who enjoy cozy or crafting games, and is especially recommended for creative players. Some reviewers highlight the game's unique experience, engaging storyline, and satisfying gameplay mechanics.
- Desire for more content (weight 0.1): Reviewers are looking forward to potential future content additions and improvements to the game. There is specific interest in improved UX for crafting elements and a mode to continue crafting after the ending.
- More scavenging items wanted (weight 0.03): One reviewer suggests that adding more items to find while scavenging would improve the overall gameplay experience. This indicates a desire for more variety and depth in the exploration aspect of the game.
- Improve save system (weight 0.03): One reviewer wants saves that don't make you restart the day to exist before playing further. This indicates a desire for more control over the game's save system.
- More bugfixing needed (weight 0.03): One reviewer is looking forward to more bugfixing. This indicates that the game still has some bugs that need to be fixed.
- Subjective content warning (weight 0.02): One reviewer does not recommend the game for those sensitive to "wokeness" or furry content. This point is included for completeness, but has a low importance score due to its subjective nature and lack of specific feedback on gameplay or mechanics.

Other player notes:
- Explores gender identity themes (weight 0.08): The game includes gender-fluid, agender/non-binary, and transgender themes. Gender blending is present and fitting to the characters.
- Saves and accessibility settings (weight 0.05): The game includes both autosave and manual save functions. It also has audio, display, resolution, and accessibility settings, including an option to turn off mini-games.
- Item variety and desk sorting (weight 0.05): There are many different kinds of the same item. Foraged items end up loose on the desk, but can be sorted into drawers.
- Requests: endless mode, achievements (weight 0.05): Reviewers suggest adding an endless mode with different characters and achievements to extend the gameplay experience.
- Early access: changes expected (weight 0.04): The game is in early access and hasn't been out for a week yet, so changes are expected. This context is important for interpreting reviews, as the game is still under development.
- Race/gender affects NPC dialogue (weight 0.03): The player's choice of race and gender influences the dialogue with NPCs throughout the game. This adds depth and replayability to the game.
- Good but unnecessary voice acting (weight 0.03): The voice acting is good but ultimately not necessary. This suggests that while the voice acting is well-done, it doesn't significantly impact the gameplay experience.
- Not a typical simulator (weight 0.02): The game is not a simulator in the style of other simulators. This suggests that the game may have unique gameplay mechanics or features that differentiate it from other games in the genre.

Emotions:
No emotions}