Happy Cafe vs Shop Heroes
Happy Cafe
Happy Cafe is a restaurant/cafe management sim that may bring to mind games like Restaurant City (R.I.P.). Unlike traditional cooking-themed sims, this game allows you to actually build your own restaurant from the starter restaurant that you get. Prepare and cook a wide variety of dishes from across countries and cultures, put them up on display counters, and serve them to your respective customers. Like most sims though, you can decorate your place to your liking, expand your cafe, upgrade your kitchen appliances and also, being a rather social game, invite your friends to help you out from time to time. Best yet, the game even has a nice eco garden where you can plant, grow and harvest your very own organic ingredients to be used at your cafe.So, if you're looking for a restaurant/cafe management sim that's more laidback and where its "cooking process" merely includes a waiting time, then Happy Cafe is the game for you. It may not be a time management game, which happens to be an area they are an expert in, but Nordcurrent manages to deliver a wonderful game nonetheless.
Shop Heroes
Shop Heroes is an incredibly fun and addictive, medieval/fantasy shop simulation that has some RPG elements. In this game, you play as a shopkeeper with a newly established shop that provides various types of RPG adventurers with their weapons, armor, and accessories. As opposed to only selling them, you will also need to hire crafters to craft the said items, and each crafter has their own sets of skills while each item will require certain sets of skills to craft. Thankfully, you can hire more than one crafter (eventually) and hence, you will be able to produce more than a few selected categories of items later down the road.These items can then be sold to the RPG adventurers who approach you at your shop. Selling to them, however, usually means that you'll be selling at market price, though you are given the option to lower your prices to earn Hearts or use Hearts to inflate your prices. Since most adventurers would want a very specific item to buy, which you may not have available, you can also use Hearts to change their minds. Naturally, trying to suggest a closer alternative to buy would cost you fewer Hearts.
The game also has RPG elements where you can recruit and send adventurers into various dungeons to earn special crafting materials that these dungeons only provide. There's PvP as well, where you can assemble a team of 5 to battle a randomly selected player's team of your bracket. Not to mention, you can even group up with other shopkeepers via guilds and work together on weekly challenges to win freebies, in addition to cooperatively building up the guild facilities so as to obtain a better guild-wide buff.
Shop Heroes is a game that is one of its kind because it not only managed to flawlessly merge both shop simulation and RPG into a fun and exciting package, but also to provide its game completely free. You can advance, albeit at a slower pace, in this game without spending a single cent if you like, but of course, if you enjoyed playing the game, you might want to spend some cash just to show your support.