Recettear is the story of an item shop, the girl who lives in it, and the fairy who turned her life upside down. Recette Lemongrass finds herself in charge of an item shop built into her house, in order to pay back a loan her father took and then skipped out on – and Tear, her newfound fairy “companion,” won’t take no for an answer! As Recette, you have to decide how you’ll get your stock – either through playing the markets in town or going out into the wild with an adventuring friend and thrashing beasts until they give up the goodies – how much to sell things for, what the shop should look like, and how to best go about getting the money Tear needs to pay off the loan. If you can’t come up with the money…well, hope you like living in a cardboard box.

Key features:

• Manage all aspects of an item shop – from stock to interior design!
• Explore randomized dungeons – never quite the same twice!
• Multiple adventurers to choose from when dungeon-diving – no two play the same!
• Plenty to do after beating the game – challenge yourself with Survival Mode or play to your heart’s delight in Endless Mode!
• Engaging story, localized by Carpe Fulgur – get to know the people of Pensee!

No doubt, Carpe Fulgur had some interesting choices when deciding on their first title to import from Japan, but I think they hit the nail on the head when they choseEasyGameStation’s Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale.

Manage your shop and your warrior gofer

Old school Zelda-style hack and slash dungeon crawling combined with a casual store-keeping game you might catch your mom playing. Sound like an unlikely combination?

It is.

The key controls are not intuitive and can be totally frustrating at first for those not already familiar with the arrow keys + zxc standard and there is scarce little help in this regard from the otherwise extensive opening tutorial. And there’s a LOT of exposition before any action happens. So does it pay off?

It does.

We’ll look at the two elements individually, then tie them together (which seems like what the developers did anyway).

>> Read the rest of the review at IndieGameReviewer.com >>