Come in, dear customer. Gaze upon my wares and find yourself an antique that meet your tastes. Don’t fret if it wriggles or writhes, I give you a personal guarantee of quality. What’s that? You don’t have the means to pay the blood moon? I believe that forfeits your soul to me, but don’t fret, I’ll find an ideal suitor to purchase it in due time. For after all, I am the Fortune Seller.
Fortune Seller is what happens when you let spiritualistic capitalism run rampant. A gothic inspired roguelike that has you selling a host of increasingly wild trinkets to equally erratic and strange customers. Fail to deliver on your weekly projections for profit, and you’ll find yourself cancelled faster than a AAA title failing to “reach expectations”.
‘Ello Seller, What’re Ya Buyin’?
From the moment you ring the bell upon entering the shop, Fortune Seller has its wares on clear display. A brief tutorial teaches you the basics – sell enough items to meet your quota, or die. Why is the mysterious and ethereal shopkeeper so ruthless? No idea, but perhaps that’s part of her charm. Aside from that, there’s not a whole lot else of story to barter with.
The game’s approach is simple and straightforward, though by no means easy. You’re faced with a Resident Evil 4 style inventory box, upon which you have a select number of spaces available. Some squares will have modifiers that increase or decrease the value of sold items, depending on their arcana type. Mix and match your randomly selected available items to fill the box as efficiently as you can.
Only catch is, many are misshapen, or may fall foul of the debuffing modifiers. You can re-roll your pool of sellable detritus up three times per in-game day, but then you’re at the mercy of RNG if you’re unsuccessful. While very straightforward to learn, the game is exceptionally brutal in execution. In fact, after 3-4 hours and numerous attempts, I still hadn’t passed week 3.
(Un)fortunate Son
Not only must you contend with squeezing as many items into the box as efficiently as possible, but there are both spell and tarot cards to grapple with. Spells provide buffs that multiply values around selected items, or can destroy unwanted junk, for example. Tarot cards provide ongoing benefits, such as bestowing 150% the value of a box, provided every space is filled.
Tarots can be both reversed (with differing effects) and upgraded, to help you maximise your output. Both types of cards are hugely important to any run, and finally figuring out how best to maximise a hand feels very rewarding. However, even with what seemed like a favourable run of luck, I was still coming up short by a significant margin.
The gameplay loop of Fortune Seller was relatively engaging to me. We all enjoyed the juggling act of swapping round grenades and healing items to Tetris our way to a stacked briefcase in RE4 after all. This title captured a little of that magic for me, but it at times felt spiteful with how ludicrously high the quotas were. After a certain period, the appeal of core mechanics fades and I was just left with spinning items and spinning my own mental wheels.
Sell Up
Fortune Seller also keeps everything contained within each run, with no real persistent progression to slowly increase your abilities. New items and starting kits can be acquired through in-game challenges, but most of these are fairly arduous and unintuitive to achieve naturally. Most progression is instead kept to the shop, where you can purchase items, spells, Tarots and accept a contract (with subsequent boon and vice) if you wish.
To its credit, the game’s mechanics blend well together and I can see the potential for a really addictive roguelike experience. Sadly, I really just struggled to find much willingness or motivation to continue given the brick walls I was consistently running into. Going from roughly 3,000 score needed by the end of week 1, to 100,000 and 1 million by the end of weeks’ 2 and 3 just becomes arduous.
Perhaps I’ve been especially unfortunate with RNG, or just not understanding some hidden mechanic I’ve not investigated enough, but I couldn’t work it out. I’ve played many a roguelike, and many a deckbuilder, yet Fortune Seller might one of the most unforgiving I’ve faced. Which is a shame, because the concept here is very good, but the balancing is way out of whack and it can’t support the repetition required without some sense of persistent progression.
A Fortune In The Making
There’s plenty to like about the straightforward and accessible design philosophy of Fortune Seller. I also very much dig the art style and direction, minimalistic as it is. Unfortunately, I just came away from my time with it frustrated and irritated, much like suffering the wrath of an over-zealous haggler, chipping away at my patience.
I appreciate that a shadowy, demonic creature forcing me to work a till for blood payment is unlikely to be much of a flexible boss, but even so, Fortune Seller’s demands are just too much. With a bit of tuning and reworking, I can really see this game polish itself up to a fine sheen, ready for resale. As it sits on the shelf right now though, the (metaphorical) heavy price tag means I’d recommend shopping for your fortune elsewhere, until such a time comes that its ready for business.
Fortune Seller is available April 6th on PC (review platform).
Developer: Kiwick
Publisher: Kiwick
Disclaimer: In order to complete this review, we were provided with a promotional copy of the game. For our full review policy, please go here.
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