Demo: Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale

The items featured in the window tell customers what you primarily sell.

It's not often you get a feel for how the other half lives, but that's exactly what we get in Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale (demo available on Steam).  It's the oldest story in the world: girl's father leaves adventuring and a mysterious fairy loan shark visits the girl telling her t hat she owes some ungodly amount of money on her father's behalf.  She lives in an adventuring town, so why not open an adventuring shop to make back the required gold?

To this end, Recette (the player) and her loan shark/item shop partner, Tear, buy goods low, and sell them high! With a payment lurking every 7 days, it's sometimes stressful when your worried that the poor little Recette might be out of luck without your skillful intervention.

Command changes to the adventurer you hire,
for dungeon crawling hack and slash.

To get items, you may buy them wholesale, or from patrons looking to sell (you're like a pawn shop).  Additionally, you can hire adventurers to go out with you into dungeons to defeat monsters and loot chests.  The adventurers will be equipped with any items they have bought in your store, so it behooves you to consider wisely in item placement and sales to adventurers.

The demo takes you through the first week and the recruitment of a base-level adventurer.  The graphics are quaint, but they really work for the game.  There is plenty of tongue-in-cheek dialogue, which is actually pretty welcome, since the premise is silly anyway.  We also get a glimpse of a rival shopkeeper, so that promises to be interesting.  Also, we really ought to find out what happened to your father and why he burdened you with this massive debt.

Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is a great grab, even though it's no longer on sale on Steam.  Highly recommend that you run the configuration program prior to playing or you may hit every button on the keyboard before learning that Z was the default key for "Accept."  (Z?  Seriously?)