Capitalism, ho! – Recettear
I have a list. A list that is huge. Gigantic. Titanic (no, not the ship). On it is every game that I would like to be able to get around playing, and it’s topped by a lot of ‘Triple A’ titles, games that got the million dollar budgets, with production values equal to it and that’s suppose to sell and sell. Somewhere on this list is games that I’d like to play because of nostalgic value, titles I’ve played it when I was a kid, but that I’d like to go back to just to see it with a new set of ‘adult eyes’, in hopes of grasping it better. And then there’s the games that caught my eye, raised my eyebrows and had me going ‘I have no idea what this is…but I have to try it’. Let’s talk about one of those.
Two points needs to be raised straight away about this game. First of all, it’s as cute as a batch of candy-coated puppies dipped in sugar swimming in a pool of candy floss. It’s also more japanese than a samurai eating sushi and washing it down with some sake. If you can’t cope with either of these, this game is going to be a challenge for you.
The game itself is a small 15 euro deal that you can easily get off Steam, and that tends to fall victim for sales every now and then. When starting, you wake up as the young woman Recette and is forced by the fairy called Tear to work as an itemshop owner. Why? Apparently your dad left after him a huge debt when he decided to ditch the shop and become an adventurer. It’s great that the game instantly establishes that the last person that did this thought it was lame and decided to go do something else. Way to sell yourself there, game.
The entire deal of the game is therefore to make money, and every aspect of it also centers around money. It does do a good job of pacing itself and keeping new, interesting thing coming. You do start out with the very basic concept of being able to sell an item, but by the 4th or 5th hour there’s at least three different variables of the selling and buying scenario. Oh, and you can totally customize your shop with random wallpapers and such. Sounds standard? It is, until you realise how furiously devilish that is.
See, the thing is that every two weeks or so, you need to pay a set amount, and while money is easy to make, run yourself dry, and you’re more or less screwed. It makes the balance between those buying those black walls filled with skulls and incantations of doom and death and actually paying off your debt all the more trickier. That kind of wallpaper may or may not exist within the game.
‘But Viking’ you say, ‘I’ve heard of elements of dungeon crawling in order to collect loot in this game, so even if I end up spending all my money on furniture that still isn’t better than anything I could get from IKEA, I should be safe anyway no?’.
To that I answer that you’re but a young, naive and foolish girl, and before you start to think I’ve questioned your manly macho stature, I’m talking about in-game. Or well, let’s say that anyway.
While these elements does exist in this game, and are quite abundant, you aren’t a fighter and therefore have to rely on hired help. As you progress you unlock certain characters, but so far I’ve managed to get myself a warrior type, a rogue and a caster…wait, I thought I did Dragon Age 2 last week? On that note, innovation isn’t the strongest card this game has to play, but everything is functional enough, it’s light-hearted, and it works. That’s not to say some design decisions isn’t horribly flawed. For example, the dungeons are broken up into level ranges of a couple of levels for each block. Now, if you manage to select the wrong block, you’ll be instantly teleported in there. Is there a way to leave instantly? Sure. Will you be penalized for it? Hell yeah.
The reason for that is that a game day is split into 4 chunks. Doing a thing such as organising a sale takes 1 round, same with shopping and so forth, while dungeon crawling takes 2. Therefore, select the wrong dungeon and leave it, and you’ve wasted half a day, plus the money spent to hire the hero. When you’re a silly person like me, this happens a lot, which is why you also learn very quickly to save before you do anything. Anything at all.
The game itself does have some quirky and hilarious moments however. You can sell everything from cherries, apples and bread to broadswords made of iron and ancient artifacts and pocket lint, and everything has a modifier. If you’ve played any sort of RPG at some point you’ve probably encountered Mighty Ogreslaying Sword of Firey Death +1, or Helmet-that-obviously-isn’t-really-just-a-cooking-pot +3. Have you ever looted or encountered a savage beast that wielded and ultimately dropped an Apple +2 or Candy Bar +1? Just think about it! You can assume that the above mentioned sword would bring more firey death to ogres than it’s normal standard counterpart, but the apple? Is it…applier? A brighter red? It’s these kind of things that makes you ponder the very essence of what actually makes an apple and end up spending way too much time on it, just to come up with the quasi-meta-theory that you probably need to get the hell outside a bit more.
In the end of the day though, is the game worth it? After about 5 hours of gameplay the game itself was still throwing me new things to learn, and while the core concept in itself might be able to become a bit stale or repetitive, the game is a good batch of fun, especially considering the price. I don’t regret my purchase at all, if nothing else because you can’t call yourself a gamer until you’ve sold an Egg Toast +3 to someone for an insane amount of gold.
Here’s me hoping that I can do a couple more of these in the future to bring forth some more unknown games that might be worth your money and time. Oh, and my essay on the fundamentals of egg toast should be on it’s way. Watch this space. Also, Flickr.
