It’s undoubtedly right to assume thatRecettear: An Item Shop’s Taleis one of the more important indie games that you’ve never have heard of. You see, it was the first Japanese PC game ever released on Steam, and its success helped kickstart a chain of events - including the release ofDark Souls’own hugely popular PC port - that proved there was an enormous demand for Japanese games on PC and not just consoles.Recettear’sdevelopers thought it’d only sell 10,000 copies, but instead it sold over 500,000.
You wouldn’t know it by playing Recettear today, though. Ten years is a long time, especially for an indie game, and Recettear’s adorable charm and engrossing loop of dungeon delving and bartering are now buried under some archaic limitations. For example, Recettear is only playable in one of four resolutions, and none of them are even close to being HD. There’s no mouse support whatsoever, you can’t adjust a lot of basic settings in the game (you have to launch a separate tool), and it defaults to using a bunch of nonsensical keybinds that will take a while to get used to. Ironically, playing Recettear now feels a lot like emulating a console game. I didn’t mind it back in 2010 when I first beat it, and I don’t mind it now. That’s because the charming Recettear is an easy game to love.