Thank you Ultimate Publishing for sending us a code to review!

Pawnbroker Simulator is another is a growing catalog of modern games that gives you the simple task of running your own shop. Where games like Supermarket Simulator give you a small supermarket to manage, Motorcycle Mechanic Simulator 2021 (unpublished by us) gives you a mechanic shop to both fix and resell motorcycles, and PowerWash Simulator 1 & 2 ask you to clean things, Pawnbroker Simulator gives you a small storefront in the city left to you by your late father to run a pawn shop. For the first few in-game days, your uncle will talk in your ear and give you the basics of how to run the shop. How you set up and manage the shop, what you choose to specialize in, and how much or how little to make is all up to you.

There are a few major mechanics that make up the game. First, there is shop setup. You start with nothing but a sales counter, but you also start with some cash in the bank, so you have to buy some shelves or display units to store and show off your goods. How you lay them out in your small store is up to you. You can also change your store name, the colors of the name and awning, and the logo for your store. You will also be responsible for spending money to decorate the store, like painting the walls or changing the flooring. You also have to keep the store clean by scrubbing the foot- and handprints off the floors and walls to keep the store's appeal up.

Once you have the place open, you need goods to sell. People come to your store all the time trying to pawn their items off to you. This is where the next major mechanic comes in: inspecting items. When people bring their goods, you have a basic idea of how much the item is worth. But to get a more accurate idea, you have to pick up the item and use your mouse to rotate it and click on any inspection points that appear. Doing so will update your market price estimates for the item as well as update your understanding of the item's condition.

When you are satisfied you know what the item is worth, it's time to haggle with the seller. They come in with an idea of what they are hoping to sell the item for. You can either choose to say yes to their price immediately or, based on your understanding of the item's value, try to buy it for less. Depending on different traits of the seller's personality, some of them will be willing to sell items for well under market value, while others are not willing to sell for less than the mid-range of the market value for the item. According to the loading screen tips, backing out of a bad deal with a seller may make them less likely to be willing to haggle down with you in the future. I am certainly no master of the mechanics, so I certainly wouldn't be able to write a guide on how to min-max your profits. There are just some NPCs I have never bought a thing from because they always want more than I'm willing to pay.

Once you have something to sell, you place it on one of your displays and set a price for it. Placing similar items together actually increases the appeal they give to your store, so there is an art to arranging your items. Again, the item's market price range is shown when you go to set the price. You are actually encouraged to keep the price for items high because, when you sell an item, some buyers will try to buy the item for less than its listed price. In other words, you haggle on the sale of the items, too. Again, some people are willing to pay more than others. The game will show you how much you bought the item for as well as what you have it listed for, so you have an idea of how much of a profit you can make off the item. Sometimes it's just better to wait for a more eager buyer.

There are also some people who want to "loan" their item off to you in a different way, where they want you to hold onto the item until a certain date. In these cases, when they come back for the item, they pay back what you loaned to them plus interest. If they fail to come on the date they agreed, you get to keep the item and sell it normally. For these items, you are actually incentivized to try to buy the item for higher than you normally would because the loan's interest charge is percentage-based. However, you don't want to go TOO high, lest you end up stuck with the item and have to sell it yourself.

As you inspect, buy, and sell items, your understanding of those types of items increases, giving you a more accurate market price range and making the inspections go faster. You can eventually earn experience points to spend on different aspects of the pawning experience, such as better prices when haggling or discounts on displays bought for the store. Finally, there is a folder full of licenses you can apply for. These act as a sort of quest, where you have 48 in-game hours to complete some condition. Usually, the condition is to buy and sell a certain number of a particular item category, but some involve making sales during certain hours of the day or spending so much money on visual improvements to your store. Once a license is achieved, it gives a permanent boost to your store. One license actually unlocks a repair mechanic, allowing you to fix up poor-quality items to try to sell them for more. Displaying those licenses gives other unique benefits, like increasing the likelihood of sellers bringing certain items to the store.

One more thing you need to be aware of are thieves. People may try to rob your store. Spending money on security may alert you when someone is trying to walk out with something, and it increases the odds police will be able to recover and return the item should the thief get away. If you notice someone trying to steal something, you can stop them yourself by removing one of your slipper and slo-mo slapping them to the ground. You get your item back, they brush themselves off and calmly leave your store like nothing happened.

The overall gameplay loop is relatively fun. These simulator-style games certainly fulfill some kind of niche, allowing you the reward of running your own business with little of the risk. Of the simulator games I mentioned at the top of this review, the one most feels similar to is Supermarket Simulator, to the point that the storefront and map outside the store feel almost identical. However, where Supermarket Simulator asks you to manage inventory, expand the store, manage prices, and gives you options for automation like hiring workers to restock shelves or check out customers, in Pawnbroker Simulator, it's only ever just you. The act of inspecting every item you buy can get more than a little tedious, for starters. You also get way more people showing up to sell you items than come to buy items. I'm afraid to criticize that last bit too harshly, though, because I think that's on purpose. I just have an issue where I'm obsessed with keeping my store stocked to the gills and cannot keep liquid cash in my bank account no matter how hard I try. I also have not done a good job in specializing my stock; I just kind of buy anything so long as I have the money for it. I'm pretty sure the loading screen hints have tried to tell me I'm not exactly optimizing my store.

There are roughly 20 NPCs in the game, meaning the same 20 people are the only ones who will enter your store. On the one hand, this allows for a unique mechanic where you can learn how each individual person haggles, allowing you to get an absolute steal from some people and knowing that others are just going to be super difficult to deal with. On the other hand, this means it's the same tired faces always entering your store. This is especially weird when thieving is taken into account, because it's random who will try to steal something, meaning eventually every single person who enters your stop will be guilty of trying to steal something from it. It'd go a long way toward making the experience feel more realistic if there was a larger roster of NPCs, and only a subset of them were "familiar faces" who are either deal-hunters, resellers, or compulsive hoarders.

Pawnbroker Simulator's graphics leave a bit to be desired. Graphics aren't everything, but the way that items show as being in poor condition doesn't always make sense, whether it's rust spots on leather bags or wrinkles on LCD displays that make them look like crumpled pieces of paper. Considering you're a pawn shop, you expect to get some items in poor condition, but the items a lot of times just look ugly. A little more care and attention to item detail, with maybe some medium-condition items that have some cosmetic scratches as opposed to the entire item looking like it just got out of an acid bath, would go a long way to making the game look more pleasant.

There are just plain graphics glitches to deal with, too. Occasionally, people's arms will rotate opposite to the way human anatomy dictates, their shoulders swinging out of socket and their forearms clipping through their torso. When some people smile, there is some separation of the different parts of the graphics meshes, showing gaps into their insides or displaying their teeth clipping through their bottom gums. Some UI labels have text inside them that gets clipped for being too long. Another issue is with the UI Scaling option in the game menus, which scales everything except the bar at the top, which displays the date, the number of people in the store, your profits for the day, and your liquid cash. When playing from the couch, I could barely keep track of how much money I had to haggle with because I couldn't make that part of the screen any bigger.

Graphical glitches aren't the only bugs. Occasionally while haggling, the offer you make won't match what you type, causing you to pay whatever the seller is asking for instead of what you were trying to haggle for. More than once, I well overpaid for an item because of this particular bug. Then I had an in-game day where people kept wandering around behind the checkout counter, despite not having any items back there for sale or any display counters facing that way. You can greet customers when they enter the store, which helps them to stay longer (either to shop or be willing to wait in line to sell), but only if you're standing directly in front of them. If you choose to start haggling with a customer, you can't go back to just opt not to buy the item; it instead counts as a failed negotiation.

Then there are the issues with bundled sales. Sellers can try to sell you multiple items at once, and buyers can try to buy multiple items at once. For sellers, you can choose which items you want to haggle on. But if you start haggling on a group of items, you cannot back out and decide to add or remove items and try again. That means that, if you're set on one of the items, or start haggling by accident like mentioned before, you can't stop haggling and fix which items you actually want, and you may lose the item if negotiations fail. For buyers, the issue is that I cannot see the purchased and listed prices for items when they are being bought as a bundle. This makes it much harder to know how aggressive I need to be in my negotiations and makes it impossible to know if my counter-offers are even less than the listed price of the items or not.

The music and sound design also leaves something to be desired. Your uncle's voice acting in the beginning of the game is good, but that is the end of the good voice acting. The people in your store have a handful of canned lines when you interact with them, and I'm pretty sure they only have a couple voices across the 20 NPCs. This would be fine in a vacuum, but going up and greeting 5 people in my store back to back and having 4 of them say the same thing in the rumbley faked voice is less preferable than a simple "Hi" in a myriad of different voices would have been. There is nearly always the sound of cars and sirens outside of the store; I spent a long time thinking I had missed a robber walking out of the store.

But my biggest gripe is the music. It's somewhere between "oldies rock" and "surfer", with a bluesy electric guitar taking point. It's too forward in the audio to be able to totally tune it out, and something about it gives me the feeling of running a sleazy, cigarette smoke-filled, less-than-reputable establishment. There also isn't a huge variety in the music. I'd rather just turn the music in the settings, but I'd also love for there to be an option to set different styles of music for the store.

Morally speaking, there's not too much to worry about with this title. Your uncle says the word "ba***rds" once. A board game that can be bought and sold pictures a woman holding a glass of wine on the front. Some of the NPCs wear slightly revealing clothing, such as small amounts of cleavage, tight yoga pants, or visible midriffs. However, there are a lot of occult items that can be bought and sold. You are of course under no obligation to buy anything you don't want to to run the store, but there are Cthulhu and Buddha statues, pentagrams, a book called "The Dark Arts Compendium", an action figure villain called "Doctor Hex", and demonic masks similar to those in traditional Japanese theater.

Despite my complaints about the music, graphics, and inspection mechanics, I had a lot of fun with Pawnbroker Simulator. It scratches the itch of running a store and making money buying and selling all sorts of interesting things. While I personally prefer the mechanics available in something like Supermarket Simulator more, I still think Pawnbroker Simulator has a lot of good going for it. The game is still being actively worked on, with console ports also on the way. If store management simulator games are something you enjoy, there's enough different here from the competition to make it worth your while.

-maestro_dana