If you’ve ever thought to yourself, ‘man, I would really love to play a game about crafting swords and armour and jewellery for fantasy characters and anthropomorphic animals, but I want to do it specifically as a humanoid moth’, then I have some wonderful news for you. CraftCraft: Fantasy Merchant Simulator is the new release from Placeholder Gameworks, (who are the team behind the 2020 ‘Papers, Please’-esque game, Death and Taxes), Pineapple Works and Hawthorn Games.

CraftCraft follows the story of the player character, a new store owner from the local Crafters Guild in the whimsical fantasy town of Windspell. As a new crafter and store owner, it’s up to you to prove your worth to the Guild, as well as to the local townsfolk who will become your loyal customers. Armed with a hammer, a basic forge, a workbench and a dream, it’s time to stake your claim in the town and make sure everyone knows your name.

As CraftCraft is a fantasy game set in a fantasy world, you get to make a fantasy character. There are only three races to choose from: an elf, an anthropomorphic cat or a humanoid moth. It would have been nice for some more options, as there’s a large number of unique races of characters we meet through the game, but I think being able to be a moth is super cute. The customisation options are limited, but you can change the colours of your outfit, pick between two tail shapes as a cat, and four different wings as a moth.

Something that I didn’t expect is that CraftCraft is much more of a narrative story than a simulation game. Sure, you’re running a store and making items for people, but the characters are a consistent handful, and you get to know them more as time goes on. There’s even a bit of dating involved, and you can become romantically interested in certain customers after proving you care about them for more than an exchange of goods and services. The characters are honestly the standout part of the world, and I would have enjoyed the game even more if it were less CraftCraft and more ChatChat. Maybe I just think Placeholder Gameworks could make a really good dating sim, okay?

One of the first things of note when entering the world of Windspell is the beautiful art style. While cartoony and somewhat simplistic with bold colours and outlines, the world and characters feel alive and full of beauty. Another thing that amplifies this is that CraftCraft is fully voice-acted. Every single line of dialogue from each unique character (aside from the player character) is acted out very competently, making our personal experience with each customer feel even more rewarding. If the soft-spoken farmer who’s also a badger and also a massive sweetheart wants a dagger, you best bet I’m going to make him the best dagger he’s ever seen.

There are several areas you can visit in the town, like the tavern, where you can interact with other patrons and customers. This gives you extra dialogue, letting you learn more about them, and you can buy things from the tavern keep. Other areas like the beach and forest are a static image of the area, where you can pick up assorted items like a hidden object game, which you can use to decorate your creations. Things like shells, feathers, bones, and metal pieces can be used in various ways.

At one point in CraftCraft, a piece I was working on at the workbench fully disappeared, like it had fallen under the table, and I had to reload. Using the workbench became increasingly frustrating for me, especially on some of the more intricate items. Trying to assemble and glue together tiny parts was so finicky, and it felt like I was fighting against the game to make things work. Parts would move where I didn’t want them to be, end up behind things, or fully disappear. There are drawers on the workbench that you can use to store decorations and such, but things would just get lost constantly. There is also a trash can on the bench, but opening one of the drawers would cause the trash can to flick open and closed constantly as you rummaged through it, making for a really annoying noise the whole time.

Unfortunately, the linear experience is flawed by the number of issues I ran into during my time playing. The difficulty with crafting took the charm away, and the repetitiveness of the forge means even if you’re making a new, unique item, it’s still the exact same experience. I feel like the crafting aspect should take a bit of a backseat with characters and worldbuilding like Windspell has, because the story and lore of each customer was genuinely engaging and entertaining. It just gets overshadowed by the crafting, which, as the namesake of the game, is really unfortunate.

The devs have stated that CraftCraft is their first time making a game in the Godot game engine. They’ve been upfront about having to learn a new system and things taking longer than anticipated due to having to figure out how to make their systems work. It makes sense why the team decided to push back the release, but even now, CraftCraft feels like it’s lacking the polish needed. I hope that they will keep working hard on improving the game and updating it regularly to ensure these kinks are ironed out, because I really enjoyed the world-building of Windspell and could feel myself growing attached to the patrons of my store.