One thing that the indie space opens opportunities for is obviously diversifying offerings to cover more niche crowds or things that you wouldn’t normally associate with gaming. While city planners, theme park builders, and even farming sims make sense as possibly having a fair amount of appeal, we’ve seen more and more games tackling more unusual vocations and focuses more recently, from effective use of a power washer, to long haul trucking, and more. Given the popularity of body art, I suppose it’s surprising that the tattoo industry hadn’t yet gotten some representation, but now Tattoo Tycoon is here to heed the call.

The story and concept are pretty simple. You’re working at a local tattoo parlor that’s being leaned on by a local businessman. Given the opportunity to own the business yourself, you jump at the notion, determined to turn around the place’s fortunes and make your mark. At least that’s the idea. What’s novel is that one part of the gameplay involves you taking part in laying down some ink on customers. While I wouldn’t consider using the analog stick to be ideal in comparison to something like a mouse (sorry, no Switch 2 version currently that could allow for that) I suppose it works well enough. Given that you have incentives to hurry, since you’re able to grab bonuses for being more swift, you’ll need to get a feel for just how janky you’re willing to make people’s permanent art look. I tended to find that my style was more interpretive than literal, absolutely making each of my masterpieces far more distinctive than what any normal person would likely go with. It’s my art, don’t judge.

The thing is, it can’t all be spending time helping people with what may be bad life choices, you’ll also have to take on simply managing your shop and the minutia revolving around that. Unfortunately, I found that the balance between it being focused on tattoos and the novelty of that got a bit overwhelmed by more mundane and generic tasks. Yes, you’ll get the opportunity to come up with new designs, and spend some time trying to help people choose their body art, but that all feels quite slow in coming and can get repetitive rather than keeping you hooked. The developers seemed to understand this as well, allowing you to either let the game decide or perform the actions, or then hire other people to do them, seemingly removing the one element that would make the game stand out in the first place. The fact that I hit a nasty bug just trying to get through the tutorial also wasn’t very encouraging, and it didn’t help to counteract the sinking feeling that this experience just doesn’t come together very well.  Among other management sims on the eShop this is merely middling, and the one aspect that could have helped it stand out ultimately just feels under-developed, making it hard to ultimately get excited about.