Beautiful but, sadly, hollow.

Gameplay videos of Cloudpunk show a lot of vapors and neon, but it's important to recognize that you see *all* of Cloudpunk's gameplay in those preview videos. There's no mechanical depth whatsoever, just driving from point A to point B, awkwardly parking, manually walking your delivery to your target on foot, manually walking back. That is the entire game. The walking simulator comparisons in other reviews are on point.

This seems to be the result of a team having a really excellent, original premise for a setting, but just not having the combination of technical skill and narrative ability to deliver a game that tells an interesting story within that setting. Yes, there are story beats. Yes, you get to make decisions. No, you won't care how things would have turned out if you did things differently. So there is, technically, some element of replayability, but the story just isn't gripping enough to get through the second hour, let alone the second playthrough.

For me I think the big negative is just how depressing the story is. I get it, it's a XXXpunk future, it won't be sunshine and daffodils, and given Cloudpunk's name it's likely there won't be sunshine at all - but that doesn't excuse the game from dwelling upon the negative to the point that it becomes a flaw in an otherwise promising premise. I want to know more about how the world got this messed up. I want to explore the world's nooks and crannies and discover secrets and back-room dealings. That doesn't mean I'm remotely interested in being repeatedly reminded of how much my fully-voiced tamagotchi companion is suffering. The story just kept getting darker and darker as I went until I turned the game off because I no longer wanted to see what happened next.

At best, incomplete. At worst, a blatant cash-grab that the developer never had any intent to finish.

Gather round and hear the tale of Strange Fire, a developer who discovered a niche. Nobody else is making a 1st-person shop-management game, so Strange Fire created Shoppe Keep and dropped it into early access via Steam Green Light.

Now, Shoppe Keep wasn't bad. Not at first. Not for a game with a long ways to go in development. It was rudimentary and lacked polish, but the fundamentals of a good game and a potential new take on the genre were there. It was never going to be the next Doom, but it could have been the next Viscera Cleanup Detail.

However, only a year or so into the process of producing the game they had promised, Strange Fire declared that the first Shoppe Keep game was complete and they were opening early access for Shoppe Keep 2. A lot of people said it was a scam, a cash grab, an abuse of the fans who had invested in the initial game only to see the fruition of those initial development promises locked behind another purchase.

Some of us enjoyed the first one enough to buy the second one. Now the second game is, like the first, abandoned.

This is not a complete product. It has no content and will never get any content. Do not purchase this game.