Recettear is still the best Shop Sim I’ve played!

Okay, the other day, I played Banished for the first time in ages and despite having fond memories of it… I didn’t like it.

Well, I also have very fond memories of Recettear: An Itemshop’s Tale and I haven’t played that for more years than Banished… so I figured I should give it a go.

And well,… I still love it. It’s amazing.

Moonlighter took heavy inspiration from Recettear and is still its own thing… because no game can be like Recettear, I believe?

After playing it again for the first time in nearly a decade, I noticed how in-depth Recettear is.

The customer reputation system, the haggling mechanics, the economy in the game, the way that your shop’s appearance changes a lot of things for you in the game, and heck, even the combat are just so… so… fun and interesting.

But for anyone that isn’t in the know: Recettear is a 2007 Shop-Sim with Dungeon-Crawler elements where you buy items… and sell them… to pay off your debt. It’s quite simple. You can also go into a dungeon and loot items to then sell or use as crafting materials! There is a lot to the game, actually.

Anyway, everything has a “base price” that counts as the baseline for pricing. Generally, merchants sell items for 30% more than the base price but customers will haggle. If an item is too expensive, they’ll try to bring it down. Sometimes, people will try to bring the price down even when they are willing to buy the item at the price you want to sell it… Additionally, if you haggle too much, people will lose their patience and leave.

And well, then there’s this whole demand thing in the game where at times, items of certain materials or categories cost double or half the price… and the 30% that I mentioned before kinda goes into that, too. You can sell an item for 260% for instance when the demand is high.

So, that’s pretty cool… and sometimes, people don’t know what exactly they wanna buy… or they wanna bulk buy items and prepare an order in advance…

There is just so much in Recettear and I think it’s a case of justified nostalgia here. It’s as great as I remember it, possibly even better, actually… and I love it to bits and just wanted to rave a little about this game.

This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well.