Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale (Demo) (PC) - Guest Post

Frequent contributor Ocean reports on another indie game.

As the title suggests, you'll be playing as a girl who is in charge of an item shop!
You can download the demo here.

Options: Making the text display quickly. This is a great option. Anyway, onto the game!

You start off in your home! This is not you, it's your fairy friend.

You have an item shop! This is Child labor, how could theeyyyyyy...

Anyway, with simple tutorials, you are explained how to run the shop. Tutorials explain concepts as they come up, so it's not like "Here's everything ever about shop keeping (wall of text)... have fun!"

There are goals you have to reach each week. Basically, your dad owes money and as he's not available to pay... you have to make that much. It starts off small and gets bigger as you go along.

I'll go over a little bit of it, the tutorials will go over it with examples (so you can get some practice in too). Basically you can go out to the Merchants guild to buy some supplies for cheap, you can go to the adventurers guild to get an adventurer to go to a dungeon so you can get items, or you can go around town.

You can learn about the various options (Some which you don't need to find out about yet, such as Fusion), or go and buy stuff cheaply.

You can take the items you bought, and display it! The items by the window get the most customer attention.

You can set a price! If a customer asks for a Worn Sword, you can set a price for it and hope they accept. There's a little more to it than just hoping though. They won't ever buy something if I put that price on it. Each person has their own limit on how much they want to spend. If it's just a little high, they might haggle you, but if it's too high, they'll leave.

As you level up as a Merchant, you can do different things! You can buy from customers, change your shops looks and make it more attractive, and things like that!

You can go with an adventurer too. You aren't doing the fighting, and you're completely safe. It's the adventurer that has to go do the fighting. You can fight some enemies, pick up treasures, and continue on.

It is an action RPG, so your adventurer can use an attack, a special skill, or try dodging the enemy attacks.

And I suck at that, so I died. If you die, you can take one item back with you. As the warriors helmet has the highest base price, I'll go for taking that with me.

It's pretty neat to see the adventurers you helped show up in your shop and purchase stuff. Not this old man, that adventurer in the back.

Yeah I'm pretty laidback too.

I'm a poor, slightly darkish shop. I guess if they have to haggle you too much or upset customers, you go more dark, and if you have low prices and all, it goes to light? I haven't had enough time to really check that.

TOO CUTE.

As you merchant level up, you can start doing other things. Now people can sell things to me. I can buy them for less than the base price, and sell them for more than the base price.

Help, falling rocks!

And I just baaarely was able to make the payment! That was close!

It was very enjoyable and cute. Looking forward to see how the game goes from here!