Pocket Clothier

Genre: Management Simulation

Players: 1

.

Review:

Without a doubt the most prolific developer and publisher of Management Simulation games on Nintendo Switch is Kairosoft, who specializes in games with a retro-style isometric pixel art style, often with the word “Story” in the title. As of this writing, Kairosoft has released 55 games on Nintendo Switch, most of them Management Simulations.

After their earlier games, Kairosoft had established a few templates for their Simulation games that later games would largely follow. Game Dev Story established a Simulation-style game more focused on managing employee time and focus, while Hot Springs Story established a Simulation style in line with Theme Park Simulators where you try to cater to guests’ tastes to maximize attendance and income.

When Pocket Clothier was released on mobile devices in the US in 2012, with ports to Nintendo Switch in 2019, PlayStation 4 in 2020, PC in 2022, and Xbox One in 2024 it went for the latter of those two templates, being a game about plotting out the layout of rooms, facilities, and sales displays in your clothing shop, as well as building relations with the various clothing manufacturers supplying you with wares.

As I mentioned above, this game makes use of Kairosoft’s signature presentation style using simple retro-styled pixel art visuals presented in an isometric view, paired with repetitive chiptune music and sound effects. Apart from the annoying music, everything about this presentation is really endearing, although of course by this point anyone playing Kairosoft’s games will have gotten used to this visual style.

At this point, the common flaws in Kairosoft’s formula are all fairly expected – the tutorial is terrible, it’s often unclear what affect some choices have, it’s often unclear how to get more of a particular resource you need, there’s no way to adjust pricing or employee pay as these are all dictated to you by the level of the product or employee in question, no way to adjust sales hours, and many of the other elements of running a business are unavailable to you here.

In addition to these flaws, Pocket Clothier adds an even more confusing menu structure, as well as a really confusing ordering system where players must manage not only what they’re stocking and where, but also how much of each item to order and when. Plus, unlike other Kairosoft games, players are extremely limited in their placement here, with only a limited number of slots to place wares on each floor.

All of this is on top of gameplay that otherwise seems pretty standard fare for the Kairosoft games that have a focus on catering to customers rather than on managing a team of employees. It all works well enough, but the stuff that works has been done before, and it’s all the new stuff that makes for problems here.

In the end, I think that Pocket Clothier is a decent Management Simulation with some pretty major flaws, but beyond those flaws it is a pretty unextraordinary Management Simulation, and you’d be better off going for one of Kairosoft’s other titles, if not a game from another developer.

tl;dr – Pocket Clothier is a Management Simulation where players manage a clothing store, deciding what store displays to build and where to place them. This game is sadly lacking a lot of options, and other gameplay elements aren’t made clear enough. Plus, what little this game does to set it apart is needlessly confusing and convoluted, and everything else we’ve already seen plenty of in numerous other Kairosoft games. This isn’t a terrible Management Simulation, but it’s definitely not one of Kairosoft’s better efforts.

Grade: C-

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are Ben, Ilya Zverev, Andy Miller, Homer Simpin, Johannes, Francis Obst, Gabriel Coronado-Medina, Jared Wark, Kristoffer Wulff, and Seth Christenfeld. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}