Recettear

My original plans for this weekend were to start working on the first episode of Dozen Days of Tiles. I still am up in the air as whether I should start with my Mah Jongg effort or if Sudoku would be the better starting project. Sadly, neither have been started as Steam has their Thanksgiving sale going on and one of the games on sale (92% off) was an indie story pack that contained a game I wanted. Since the pack was less than the cost of the single game, I grabbed the pack and a game called Recettear caught my eye. It was different enough that I figured I would install it on my windows machine and try it out for a few hours. The game was so enjoyable that I am writing this post about it since it ate up my DDT time.

You play the game as a young girl named Recette. Your father ran off to become an adventurer and left you in debt. To pay off your debt, the fairy Tear is helping you turn your house into a store. Because the town you live in is a haven for adventurers, it is an item shop. While you can buy items wholesale, the fun of the game comes from hiring adventurers and then going into a dungeon to "acquire" the items so you can sell them for a 100% profit.

The game is surprisingly addictive. The only real complaint that I have about the game so far is the weekly payment. It is a skewed payment scheme where the first payment is 10000, the second 30000, the third 80000, the fourth 200000 and a final payment that I haven't seen yet but from the progression would guess 500000. While the idea here from a designers perspective is to keep the game challenging, I think the game would have been more enjoyable if the debt could be paid off at a slower pace. When I screwed up and was not able to make the 200000 payment, I discovered that instead of having to go back to an earlier save and replay the week the game would automatically restart you on day 2 but with all your stock and experience. Still, I think a better approach would have been to tie the expansion of the store to the debt. As each chunk of debt was paid off (minimum payment perhaps but small enough so game could be played leisurely) a store upgrade would start causing the loan to start again.

Still, for a low cost indie game, this is quite a fun title. My recommendation, however, is not to start on this game if you have other things to do as like many strategy games this game has a one-more-turn syndrome that causes hours to mysteriously vanish into the game.