Have you ever wanted to be that guy that sells items in shops in the RPG? Well, now's your chance. Enter the shoes of The Vendor as he collects materials, synthesizes them into other materials, sells them to heroes and watches them fight for their lives. A dash of the existing sim Recettear and an inspiration from vendors in WoW (which, apparently, is part of where Galenmereth got his influence from) and you've got the concept of The Vendor pretty down pat.

You are a vendor travelling throughout the land seeking bargains. You can either purchase items from shops to sell or you can synthesize items together to get the items you wanted for free. The graphics are RTP and the music is swelling. Enter various towns that are both lush and comforting at the same time. Your job is to purchase items from existing middlemen, or collect items from zones or the world map. Without crushing them, of course.



The Vendor has a cute mapping style and a very interesting concept. The idea of being the shopkeeper in an RPG game is not a new one, but I'm not sure whether you have had so much freedom in selling items before, travelling throughout a world map selling your goods. Usually shop sim games play the trope straight, making you stay behind a small counter for the majority of the game selling to customers and making sure their happiness is high. Take fellow Indie Game Maker Contest entry Tirawrmisu as an example. Repeat cycles of cleaning, serving and various tasks in the shop to make sure that it runs smoothly and you get a passing grade.

There are a host of NPCs that you can interact with that make this game slightly worth the ride. But I sometimes can't shake the feeling that this would have been a much more interesting game if more thought had been put into it. Right now it seems like an open-world fiesta of item-buying until you discover the needs that heroes really want, and try to cater to those. But once you have that specific idea, it becomes a sweat-inducing task of figuring out all the formulae and the weaknesses and strengths and a lot of note-taking until it all becomes a bit of a slog - kind of like being a vendor in real life.



The Vendor, however, focusses on the buy and sale of items, not just to produce a profit, but to increase the hero's likelihood of survival. This is where the strangeness of the concept comes into play, something that I found both unintuitive and curious. In theory, you could sell items to a party of heroes for 0 gold as a viable strategy, just to keep them alive. You'd have to find most of the ingredients for items raw yourself, and make sure that your heroes survive safely through each battle. This notion was a little off-putting to me and at once curious because, at first, I deemed the acquisition of money to be the purpose of a shopkeeping sim. But when you look at it, this is money that funds combat in disguise. So, in essence, it's a resource management game similar to the way you decide which armour to buy in a store, except the choices require a bit more specificity.

Although the central mechanic was both interesting and innovative, it is only a single mechanic. There are various ways to go about making sure the heroes survive, but ultimately it did get tedious after a while. Perhaps that's the life of a vendor, doomed to be in servitude to his occupation to feed his family?



The game uses RTP mapping to a more than satisfactory standard, and there are some really nice map names that display as pictures when you are introduced to a new place. But even thought some of these places are randomly generated, overall the thing feels a bit stale. Spiced up now and then with interesting characters and nonsensical dialogue, I was sometimes wishing for a more fleshed-out barter system or more dynamic storyline. If there were story nodes that you could encounter during the game that would make it more interesting and varied, and a more dynamic feel in general then this game could be improved.

I think what was lacking was that rather than feeling like a game, The Vendor feels like a toy or an invention. A very clever device that uses innovation as its selling point, but I felt I could do not much more but just play with its mechanics and go, "Ah, so that's interesting." Perhaps even some variation in gameplay, such as the Vendor having to fight monsters himself to get ingredients, would prove a very interesting side-note. But I am guessing that Galenmereth (the developer) did not wish to put combat inside his game, so I would replace it with some other interesting diversion - anything to distract from the main mechanic to make it a more consistently enjoyable experience.



The Vendor is an innovative shopkeeping game with a fascinating open-world twist. Although it sags in interest in the latter half, it presents a concept that separates it from others in its genre. It is worth checking out because of curiosity, or if you are a big fan of the concept/genre.