A Hero's Rest

by Aethyna Oct 6, 2024 | 2 Votes | 21 Played | 0 Reviews

9 rate

Genres:

Simulation

Graphics:

Labels:

City Building , Building , Fantasy Setting , Medieval Age , Shop Design

Platforms:

Publishers:

Vanargand Games Set up a rest stop for various adventurers and sell them anything they may need to get back on the road again. Spruce up the place, diversify your offerings, hire adventurers to gather resources for you to craft a variety of gear for them, and grow your little “rest stop village” in A Hero's Rest! Play Now Similar Games

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Summary Plotline Gameplay Graphics/ Sound Conclusion

Summary

A Hero’s Rest is a sandbox shop simulation game that’s designed like a village builder. In this game, your goal is to set up a rest stop for various adventurers as per the King’s instructions and sell them anything they may need to get back on the road again, such as food, better equipment and weapons, and potions. Spruce up the place, diversify your offerings, and hire adventurers to gather resources for you to craft a variety of gear for them while making sure to fulfill the King’s requests and grow your little “rest stop village”!

Plotline

His Majesty the King has granted your father a piece of land perfectly situated in between the various adventuring locations to set up a little “pitstop” for passing adventurers to rest and buy anything they may need to be successful in their next adventures.

However, the thing is… your old man is a lazy bum and would do whatever necessary to avoid his responsibilities. Apparently, in light of the edict from the King, he decided to hightail it, leaving you to pick up his mess.

For you though, this isn’t just something you have to clean up after your dad but it is a golden opportunity for you to really make something of yourself and possibly strike it rich in the process. With help from the King’s own advisor, you’ve embarked on the daunting task to develop an adventurers’ rest stop that is famed across all the King’s land!

Gameplay

A Hero’s Rest starts with an optional tutorial that you might want to opt in to just so you can learn about some of the more unique nuances of the game as compared to many typical shop simulation games.

Now, the game will have you set up your innkeeper first because the first thing every adventurer will need is a place to put their feet up and have some food to restore health and MP, and possibly even get a nice buff for the next adventure. You can even build rooms, complete with beds and furniture so they can check themselves in for the night.

Building your shop in this game is sandbox-styled. To start building, you’ll need to first purchase a plot of land and lay the foundations for your walls. Each plot of land can house only one workshop and if you want to be able to craft more goods to sell, you’ll need to buy more plots of land. A workshop in this game refers to the type of shop you can open. There are plenty available here, including your next shop, the forge, along with a tailoring shop, an apothecary, and more. You’ll also want to note that each plot of land you own will be taxed by the King and the tax is paid daily, so it’s probably a good idea to not expand too fast, lest you find yourself in debt.

There’s a sizeable variety of décor and furniture that you can place to spruce up your shops, and hence, increasing the shop rating. Each shop you operate is rated by the number of stars it has, and naturally, the higher the stars, the more people will flock to the shop and the more sales you’ll make. You can increase the star rating of your shop by fulfilling the requirements shown when you click on the staff hired to operate your shop – it’s the guy behind the counter. Usually, you’ll be asked to place enough décor and display racks to “level up” your shop.

Having a shop set up and ready, it’s time to start busting out some stuff to sell, but before you can do that, you’ll need to have some resources first! There are six types of resources in this game, namely metal, herbs, wood, cloth, leather, and food. Each resource type comes in four different tiers, with higher tier materials needed to craft higher tiered goods.

There are multiple ways you can gather resources. At the beginning, you’ll likely be spending a whole lot of time just scouring the map for resources you can gather directly, specifically fish, wood, food (mushrooms), and metal - all of which are first tier items, except for the fishes. The positions of each resource node is permanently fixed on the map so once you’ve memorized all the spots, it’s just one of the chores needed in the game where you’ll have to check them regularly to see if the resources have respawned yet.

This part of the game is unfortunately very repetitive, and it’s definitely not my favorite part but it’s still pretty bearable, considering that you should be able to easily progress to other, and better, ways of gathering resources really soon.

This better way includes hiring adventurers to go on adventures to gather resources for you. You can design your adventures the way you want (or depending on the Imminent Threat warnings you receive), but the important thing here is to make sure that you create adventures with a required CR (combat rating) that matches the current CR range of the adventurers who are looking for work in your town. In the case of Imminent Threats, you may want to set up “Slay” adventures that will slay an enough number of the type of enemies that are listed as Imminent Threats. If not, you’ll suffer a penalty.

Note that CR is calculated by taking into account the gear they have on, and the level of the heroes. Heroes of lower CR who are sent on adventures that they barely qualify for is usually a bad idea mainly because they could potentially die from the attempt and there goes one of your customers!

To help increase their CR and hence, giving them a better chance of surviving whatever adventures they embark on next, you’ll need to produce higher quality gear for them to purchase. Although you don’t get to hire your adventurers individually, you can dictate what “class” of adventurers you’d like to attract to your little adventurer’s rest stop. To do so, you’ll need to help of a Weapon Master, who will visit your town from time to time, setting up shop at the Traveler’s Rest. Note that you can get him to permanently settle down in your town once you’ve built a Training Grounds, making it easier for you to access his services.

Since you can design the class of heroes yourself so it’s possible to have a mage who prefers heavy armor and a warrior who prefers the staff. It all depends on what kinds of shop you currently have, or at least, plan on adding in the near future, and designing a class that can purchase the kind of gear you will be producing.

Through the weapon master as well, you’ll be able to “upgrade” each class you’ve created to allow them to equip a wider variety of gear items, such as capes, backpacks, helmets, shields, polearms, and pauldrons. However, there seem to be some invisible restrictions in place, preventing you from having a class who is proficient in a wide variety of weapons or can equip any type of armor. After all, having a “Jack of All Trades” would defeat the need for having multiple classes.

Both creating a new class to hire and purchasing class upgrades require experience tokens that the adventurers you hire will gradually generate as they take up and complete adventuring tasks.

Similar to the Weapon Master, the traveling Trader will also visit your town from time to time, selling a variety of crafting materials for coins. The material prices change from visit to visit, and they will increase the more you buy a specific material. The trader also sells Resource Chests that cost experience tokens to purchase. These chests are basically loot boxes with a chance of getting higher tier and more expensive materials. Likewise, the cost of the chest increases the more you buy them. The cost will reset at the Trader’s next visit.

The best part though is the fact that you can eventually set up shops that will allow you to build resource-producing “upgrades”. These “upgrades”, like the lute farms for cloth and rabbit traps for leather, will passively generate resources – only the first tier though – over time once you’ve fed them the starting material needed. This is possibly the best way to really rack up a ton of resources, provided that you can set up enough of these resource-producing “upgrades” on the moderately-sized plot of land you bought.

Once you have enough materials, you can start crafting a variety of items to sell to adventurers who visit your little rest stop. Unlike some shop simulation games, there’s no mini-game involved in the crafting process. You just need to decide what you want to craft, set the parameters of the item from the item name to the item colors and appearance (note that none of these matter in the grand scheme of things), or if you’re lazy like me, and enabled the randomizer, and wait for the very fast crafting process to complete.

Each piece of crafted item also comes in several grades of quality with Legendary being the highest and Common being the lowest. For food, you can only get up to Excellent (purple) at most – there’s no Legendary food item in this game. Besides food, you can upgrade the quality of any crafted gear using Regrade Stones. These stones can be rather hard to come by since you can usually get them as a reward from completing a Royal Request, an achievement, or if you’re lucky, from a Resource Chest. If you’re lucky, you may even get a perk – shown at the top right corner of the screen, just below the music selection button – that may boost the chances of you getting a Legendary item when crafting.

To be honest, there’s actually item quality rank that’s much lower than Common, called Broken, but this grade is unique since you can’t upgrade a Broken item into a Common one, but poorer adventurers who are desperate for an upgrade will still be able to buy and use the item.

As you might expect, the fun part about crafting is its Gacha-like element where the quality of the item you’ve produced is mostly random – you just don’t know what you’d get! For food, there’s a way you can increase the percentage of getting an Excellent quality by investing more money into the creation of the food item, but for weapons and equipment, you just have the Regrade Stone to use.

Of course, similar to materials, there are different tiers of crafted goods. You can unlock the higher tiers by crafting enough of the lower tiered items and filling up the experience bar, enough to level up. However, unlike some shop sims, there’s no crafting automation here… not that it’s needed. You can craft multiple items at one go if you have the resources, but you can’t set the shop to start crafting a new item if, for instance, the number of heavy armor in stock is fewer than two.

As a shop sim, A Hero’s Rest will also occasionally throw challenges your way. For instance, the weather could turn bad, resulting in a winter storm that would greatly reduce the foot traffic you get at your “rest stop village”. The challenges aren’t all too bad and can be quite easily weathered through, even if you’re not fully prepared for it.

Graphics/ Sound

The graphics used in this game feels kind of old-school MMO-style and naturally, the visuals wouldn’t be as adorable or as polished as a shop sim game that opted for the classic cartoonish, cozy looks popularized by games like Animal Crossing. In terms of sound, the game comes with a variety of “tavern music”, which match perfectly with the game’s medieval-fantasy theme, that you can browse via the music selection button at the top right corner of the screen or the rightmost button on the menu bar at the top. You can even pause the music too if you want.

Conclusion

A Hero’s Rest offers a cozy and relaxing shop simulation experience in which you’ll not only get to manage only one shop but multiple shops, offering crucial items to adventurers who are out risking their lives to bring back materials you require to craft even more goods to sell. A Hero’s Rest is extremely well-polished and is a game that would just suck you right in from the get-go with its addictive and fun gameplay, especially if you’re a huge fan of shop sims and management games in general like Foundation, Winkeltje: The Little Shop, Tavern Master, or Founders Fortune.

New Game Added: A Hero's Rest

by Aethyna Oct 6, 2024

Set up a rest stop for various adventurers and sell them anything they may need to get back on the road again. Spruce up the place, diversify your offerings, hire adventurers to gather resources for you to craft a variety of gear for them, and grow your little “rest stop village” in A Hero's Rest!