JoeTheDestroyer's Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale review

I hope you're up for a line crit...

It's through Recette's naïve sense of trust and her partner's near bookwormish attitude, though, that make Recettear all the more enjoyable. It shows us that you shop keeps aren't just nameless NPCs who live behind a counter and smell like old cheese, but have lives and personalities.

These two sentences feel like a break from the rest of the paragraph that they conclude. I hope that pointing them out so that you read through again is enough to let you see what I mean, as it's difficult to put it into proper words. You're a good enough writer that I suspect you'll figure it out.

You want to expand your store, buy new equipment and giving your store that aesthetic value it needs to thrive.

Here, "giving" should be "give."

Your note at the end for the Drakkhen salesman was clever, but there need to be a few fixes:

Your waywardness, worthless random item select, unreliability, strange sparkling, and speech that consists of droning, guttural moans and groans has sent many an adventurer to their graves. For you, we bid you not raise your tankards in salute, but would rather you go into the swamps in the east and drown yourselves.

That should be "many an adventurer to his graves" or "many adventurers to their graves" if you prefer, not a mix of the two. Also, the second sentence should be: "For you, we bid you not raise your tankard in salute, but would rather you go into the swamps in the east and drown yourself." Unless you're referring to multiple merchants, in which case "salesman" in the first sentence of the paragraph should be "salesmen."

By the way, this was an interesting review of a game I've been meaning to play, one that I will play if I ever have enough spare time. I was going to play it and review it here, but then EmP came along and beat me to it. That's my recollection of things, anyway.

Thanks, Jason! I can't believe I missed some of those errors. The second or third paragraph you were referencing I originally intended to condense down. I appreciate the critique.

I do recommend playing it. I picked it up during the last Steam sales for a good price. It's a pretty short game, but there's quite a bit that can be done after the main story as well.

Short doesn't bother me (see: my review of Game Dev Story) as long as there's reason to keep playing it after you "beat" it. I'd say brevity works to a game's advantage these days for me, more often than not. I wish more developers would realize that... or that more gamers would realize it so that more developers could act on pre-existing realization. Or something.

Short games are good between all those big 30+ hour games.

Indeed. I appreciate a good short game now and then. That one just caught me off guard as to how short it was. Still, you can keep doing more after the closing credits, only without stringent demands.

Incidentally, how long is this short game?

Mostly depends on whether or not you get a game over. It took me just under ten hours to finish it, but had I not gotten the one game over and just hauled right through it, it probably would have been more like six or seven. I think the main reason I found it short is that I was expecting something like twenty. Not that I'm saying the shortness is necessarily a flaw.