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jp's Chocolatier (DS)
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| [January 7, 2024 03:00:22 PM]
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I guess I should be more careful when tempering my expectations based on the game's publisher.
This game was published by Zoo, and they're mostly familiar to me from their casual match-3 and hidden object games. I think. If I go and check I'll probably learn they don't do hidden object games. Ha! Well, pretty sure it was just in casual games...and this game is, sort of casual, but is a fun and interesting economic business simulator game - you have to manufacture chocolate, travel the world to buy ingredients and sell your wares, find recipes, buy more factories (to make your treats), and more. It's more engaging than I expected, really is global in scale (I only just "opened" up traveling to European and African locations) and is...fun.
Weirdly, the least satisfying part of the game is the "action" mini-game where, in each factory, when you want to start making a new kind of treat, you have to play an action-based minigame where you must assemble the right proportion of ingredients for each treat (at first it's only chocolate bars) as these empty "trays" spin around. It gets harder the longer you go and, depending on how well you do, you set the production capacity of the factory (e.g. 17 cases of milk chocolate bars a week). Oh, the game is set in the 1800s, so things are a bit slower - and you travel by sea, train, etc. Going from Brazil to San Francisco means taking a ship around South America through Cape Horn!
The simulation is pretty neat, accounting for things that make sense without getting all tied up in numbers and graphs (for the player). For example, I bought some cashews and didn't used them - the eventually went bad! (I wasn't paying attention to know how long it took for them to go bad).
Contrary to other sim games I've played - and here I'm playing the story/campaign, I'm guessing this is different in the free-play mode - it's not too hard, I felt like I was making progress, and the one time I thought I'd painted myself into a corned turned out to be just a mistake on my end (I didn't know how to sell my chocolate, and I'd spent all the money on ingredients, and then could leave the city I was in, because it costs money to travel, all solved when I realized I could sell my bars). I guess I wonder if the game breaks if you get yourself stranded in a place with no chocolate to sell and only ingredients? Can you sell your ingredients? I'm not sure if the campaign has a lose condition...
Anyways, I'm not looking to experiment THAT much with it, just to say that it has been a refreshing amount of fun I was not expecting and was surprised by.
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jp's Chocolatier (DS)
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Current Status: Stopped playing - Something better came along
GameLog started on: Wednesday 3 January, 2024
GameLog closed on: Sunday 7 January, 2024 |
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This is the only GameLog for Chocolatier. |
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