Ben Stewart’s Sword Shop is a minimalist buy-and-sell game. Every day, people come into your sword shop wanting to sell your their old gear. And, hopefully, more will come it to buy it.
Everyday you will be offered swords at different conditions and rarities, your goal is to make a profit. This is accomplished by buying swords for low prices and selling them at higher ones. Every sword you buy has a certain chance to sell at night, and if it does, you will see if you have made a profit.
You can plow profits into upgrading the store, or buying fancier swords. It’s like running a pawn store, but with gorgeous pixel art stabbers.
It’s fun figuring out the basic value ranges for each kind of sword and the materials, and I love its aesthetic and how it puts the exclusive focus on one tiny yet key mechanism of computer role-playing games (cf. my own Character creation is the whole game). However, the mechanism selected is the loot grind.
You quickly realize that you’re on that particular treadmill and that the treadmill is randomness within a range: if there is any narrative support for the grind, or interesting “handmade” loot to cherish, I didn’t get there before hopping off. Go play it and tell me if I missed something cool.