Merek’s Market is a chaotic crafting game about running a fantasy medieval shop.
You take the role of Merek as he runs around crafting and bartering with customers. The gameplay is very similar to games like Overcooked, Moving Out and Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime. There has been a great boom in single screen co-op games lately and I am all for it.
We all need more couch co-op games. Just like movies, games are far more enjoyable when you are playing/watching with others in the same room.
Back to Merek’s Market. The gameplay is identical to Overcooked, you pick up items and bring them to a specific spot to interact with it, be it hammering steel, baking pottery or just to combining it with another item to eventually create what customers are ordering.
A unique aspect of Merek’s Market, is that you deal directly with the customers and have the option of bartering with them, this takes the simple form of just choosing where on a bar you want the price and then the customer either accepts it or to makes a counter offer, when that happens you can accept it or try to push the price a little bit.
Occasionally a customer will come in with a special request which can be ambiguous and it is up to you to choose the correct item and haggle with them to get the best price, you’ll need to pay attention to the customers clothing and bearing since poor looking customers can’t pay too much and the very rich do not really care what they pay. This is an interesting twist on the formula but can be very vague at times and you could lose the sale.
The graphics are a similar style to Overcooked, though I feel they are not quite as good, animations are a little janky but thankfully that does not impede the gameplay at all. The voice acting feels a bit out of place at times and the jokes are often quite cringy and badly delivered.
When playing the campaign mode the game is split into levels, just like other games in this genre. Each level will introduce a different recipe or an aspect of the gameplay and will occasionally throw a “Boss” fight your way, which could be a Warlock commissioning a statue of himself or a Dragon demanding you craft a treasure hoard for them and while you are working on the bosses’ commission you’ll also have to deal with normal customers.
Before you know it, you are running all over trying to tackle the chaos, which can be quite fun if you manage to ride it out and complete the level and or boss, though more often than not you get frustrated with it since sometimes a customer comes in requesting a shield or a sword and barely gives you time to craft it but that is just the price you pay for chaotic gameplay like this.
If you liked Overcooked and Moving Out, and need something else to play in the same/similar genre then you can’t go very wrong with Merek’s Market.
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