Retail Therapy Preview

PopSugar Lets You Style And Relax In Retail Therapy

Celebrity gossip and fashion site PopSugar has an impressive entry into social gaming with its firs title, Retail Therapy. This is a fashion store simulator along the lines of games like Mall World, but it offers lines of name brand and designer label clothes to sell along with exceptionally detailed graphics that use 3D models for avatars.

The “Therapy” part of the title refers to the game’s relaxing music and slow, languid pace. This isn’t a game where you’re struggling for money, unless you make some questionable decisions while ordering clothes to sell or decorating your store. Instead it’s clearly a game designed to let busy women and frazzled young mothers stop for awhile to enjoy a blissful virtual shopping trip.

In Retail Therapy, you order clothes, wait for them to ship to you, then set them out and watch avatars wander by and purchase them. As you level up, you can dress your avatar more stylishly and unlock more posh types of clothing to sell. The only not-intuitive part of the gameplay is that moths will show up and eat clothes if you don’t put them up for sale quickly enough. This isn’t relaxing and doesn’t make any sense, so hopefully it’ll disappear in future game revisions.

In addition to decking out your avatar, you can customize your store however you’d like. There’s no level unlock requirements on decoration pieces, so you can begin planning your dream store from the very beginning of your game. The variety is excellent for a game this new and really encourages you to focus on trying to make money. While there are pieces you can buy with real money, there’s not too many to tempt you.

It’s a little unclear what the social dimension of Retail Therapy is, as of this writing. It seems like you can add people from your friendslist to your store as employees as you level up, which is useful since it frees you up to focus on ordering clothes and tidying the shop. You can definitely send and receive free gifts and it seems likely you’ll be able to visit friends’ shops as well. Retail Therapy is definitely a game to keep an eye on if you like fashion sims.

Alicia Ashby