Review anarchistica 2/5 · Mar 6, 2025
What a bizarre mess
Playtime: 3h17m (5-6 in-game weeks)
Review
KK is a game in which you buy and sell cards, talk to people and decorate your shop. It fails on every level, sometimes in really weird ways.
First of all, the store aspect. Every day you get news that cards will go up or down in price. You have to try take advantage …
Playtime: 3h17m (5-6 in-game weeks)
Review
KK is a game in which you buy and sell cards, talk to people and decorate your shop. It fails on every level, sometimes in really weird ways.
First of all, the store aspect. Every day you get news that cards will go up or down in price. You have to try take advantage of this. In addition you get requests for cards with certain traits (colour, power, set) with a short deadline. The game doesn't even get this right. There are only a handful of news messages (max 10), the requests are seemingly randomly generated and the inventory system is dogshit:
Not only can you not sort by name (cards get banned/unbanned), you only get a single filter anyway. Need a blue card with X power in Y category from set Z? You can only sort based on one of those things. The sets aren't even sorted alphabetically, absolutely no thought went into this core aspect that you constantly engage with.
Next up is the story. It is the most haphazard nonsense this side of the "Bloody Baron" from Witcher 3:
A thief gives you a legendary card which is an ancient Thai artifact from 1200 BCE that your parrot who talks like a human is the ancient guardian of and the boss of the thief is the co-founder of the card game and he want to buy your store to organise a boycott against the company he sold it to and then your parrot turns into a guy and now you play as him.
Or something. This is only half of the insanity. Often is just feels like you missed an entire episode of a TV series. And the presentation is awful too, of course. Your dialogue is a button at the bottom left, the NPC talks in the center and the order in which you talk isn't always clear.
There's also a friend (/romance?) system with hearts. One time i lost a heart because i didn't have the $68 to buy a $38 card from someone. For context: $68 is a lot of money at that point and over double previous asks. Just... what?
Even decorating the store is implemented badly. There are no elements to pick from initially (nor any character customisation). Each day a random element goes on sale for $5, the rest costing $20. Money being tight you will never buy stuff that isn't on sale. On top of that decorations can only go in pre-determined spots, there are only two wall spots for tons of decorations, and you can't modify them at all. You can't even rotate stuff.
Finally, there were two instances where the game robbed me of time. The first time the thief visits the day just ends with no option to buy stuff. The second time the guy my parrot turned into took over the story and the game just skipped several days, no warning at all. It even broke the weekly decoration quest (look at bottom left):
Conclusion
The devs took a fun concept and messed up every single one of its elements. And in such an weird way. I only acquired 2 of the 6-8 "legendary cards" that i think the game is about and i already saw "the church" declare three different card colours to be satanic, driving up their cost. It's like they spent one lunch trying to come up with about eight reasons why prices might change.
The most insane thing was that at some point the credits just rolled. I thought the game was over, you couldn't skip them. Turns out you have to go back to the main menu and load your game and now it's in a different "mode"? It's so insane i would almost recommend it just based on that. But yeah, only play this as an example of what not to do in a shopkeeper game.
