Review: Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale - Demo

Alright so after about 3.1 hours of play and completing the demo I figured that a review on this wonderful game was definitely needed necessary. So here go.

[b]Ovewview[/b]

For starters I'm not going to give a review of the story as that's said in the demo and it would spoil it just a tiny bit. Not huge spoilers but I'll give a premise as to what's going on. For starters you begin as a character known as Recette (sp?) where your partner Tear (a Fairy) are responsible for running a shop and generating a profit. To go about doing this you higher an adventurer (which you control) who goes into a dungeons killing monters, hunting for treasures, and escaping alive (sometimes this is a biggie). After the dungeons are complete you place the found items into the shop to sell the town folk and other adventures by bartering and getting the best price possible. There's also a duel leveling system one for your adventure and one for your merchant level that gains you more access to the game. This is a fairly high level of the game sense I mentioned earlier no spoilers.

[b]Enjoyed...[/b]

*Multi-style based play - While 'adventuring' the game plays like a sort of dungeon crawlers similar to Diablo, Torchlight, Chocobo Dungeon...you get the idea. So it has the element of wondering around finding cool stuff and trying to escape alive.

*Shop/Barter System - This was neat as well as the whole game didn't revolve around crawling about and then selling all your stuff to the vendor. The game actually discourages selling items to the vendor and prompts you to sell items to the townsfolk. Fairly neat system.

*3 hours of play from an psuedo-RPG - I honestly can't complain and don't need to elaborate too much beyond that point.

*The humor - not much else to say here, there's just some parts where I honestly just bursted out laughing.

[b]Not so keen on[/b]

*Delayed explanations - There are peroids of time where you go to perform action a. and then its explained later if its a good or bad idea. Wish they gave come clarification as to some concepts sooner.

*Initially price - $20 bucks for most indie games are not my cup of tea. Its a great game but the price make me iffy if I want to initially grab it.

*Slow start up - For those who don't enjoy much story and really just want to jump into the game. Either you'll have to bare with it or find something different to play. For at least the 1st hour is just plot with a tiny explanation of game play...that's about it. Once you break that threshold though it picks up quickly.

[b]Wrap-up[/b]

That's about it for the game as a whole. Pretty good and I may pick up before release though not quite decided on it as of yet. In either case will wait and see...my work here is done later all.