Pocket Clothier is a simulation game developed by Kairosoft and released on smartphones. This time, you are the owner of a fashion store selling clothes. At the start of the game, your store will only have two levels but you can expand up to a total of seven levels above ground and one basement. Your store is actually within a mall, therefore there are entrances/exits on multiple floors. As expected, the game has those pixel art styles that's reminiscent of 8-bit and 16-bit games. There is still charm here with its simplicity and it is still as fun as ever watching the little pixilated people running around.
The gameplay is a little bit simpler than previous Kairosoft games, since it seems to lack some depth. The core gameplay is that you build shelves and select which clothes to sell. The arrangement of the shelves are fixed, although the number of them depends on the floor plan. Floor plans with more shelving space are more expensive to build. There are multiple suppliers that supply clothing. You build relationships with these suppliers by selling more of their clothes. Selling enough clothing from one supplier will unlock more styles of clothing to sell and probably at higher selling prices.
Your suppliers may go through trends, with periods where their clothing are in high demand and periods where it's the opposite and you struggle to sell their lines. Putting different compatible combinations of clothing into the same floor will give you additional bonuses that affect how many pieces a customer buys in one go and how how demand it is in. This makes later parts of the game more strategic in that you will shift the positions around in order to get he maximum amount of bonuses that you can. Apart from clothing, there are also spaces for tenants within your store, it's really more of a department store.
There are many kinds of tenants that you can place into your store, including bookstores, foodstores and other more random types of shops. These are all to the side though since the focus is mainly on the clothing side of things. There's a simple inventory management system. There's lead time when ordering clothing that you need to take account of when setting reordering points. As the months go on, there will be changing seasons and trends which dictate which types of clothing will be popular and sell more. Of course, you need to hire employees to help restock the shelves, man the registers and deal with customers.
Employees cost money per month and have their own levels which you can level up, increasing their stats and satisfaction levels. Occasionally, customers will ask for clothing advice to which you will choose the types of clothing they should wear to an interview or audition etc, if successful, you can get boosts in popularity which temporarily increases the number of customers. There are two types of currency. The first is $ which you earn from selling clothing (all clothing are sold at a profit, even if you set prices to be 20% lower than normal). $ is required for buying more clothes, building and levelling shelves, paying your staff and constructing new floors.
The second type of in-game currency is medals. If this was free-to-play then this would be the premium currency but since Pocket Clothier is not a free-to-play, you earn medals from fixtures at a regular rate and are used for unlocking more clothing and levelling up staff. Every year, there are competitions to compete in where it ranks your store against specific criteria such as highest customer service, level of monthly sales and capital held. Furthermore, there is an achievement system. The game is played via touch-based menus. You can also pull up a virtual d-pad. Unfortunately, this is a game where physical buttons would be preferable since it is so menu-based. That's not to say the touch controls are bad though.
Pocket Clothier is addictive but ends up lacking enough features that you would have experienced everything the game has to offer long before the game "ends". It seems to be less strategic and lacking the hidden gameplay elements that other Kairosoft games are packed with. The game "ends" after 16 years after which you will get a high score that you can aim to beat in subsequent playthroughs. You also unlock fast mode which speeds up the game dramatically. You can keep playing though to continue unlocking everything. Overall, Pocket Clothier is really fun for the first 10 or so in-game years, but then it quickly becomes repetitive and boring since it stops introducing new gameplay mechanics. However, it's still worth your time and money since the gameplay is strong and addictive.
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