Recettear pairs shop management and price-setting with dungeon trips alongside an adventurer, so the main appeal is balancing the two activities. It costs $19.99 at Steam. The game is single-player, and Survival and Endless modes are available after beating the main game. English is listed as supported for Steam PC. Consider whether that shop-and-exploration loop suits your plans before choosing when to buy.Supported interface languages are English and Japanese, a practical consideration for a game centered on shop management and exploration.
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95%Steam Reviews6.7K reviews82Metacritic/100
Released: Oct 15, 2010
Capitalism · Anime · RPG · Dungeon Crawler · JRPG
Steam·Platform:Steam·United States Steam official price~ $19.99Buy now
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Price History
Past 36 months · Updated daily
Historical Low~ $1.992025-06Current Low Across Stores~ $19.99Steamvs. Historical Low+905%
Prices cover Steam and 39 authorized stores; only legitimate offers are counted. The chart shows weekly market-wide lows and Steam's official price across the past 36 months.
01About Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale
Run a shop as Recette and repay a loan by choosing its stock, setting prices and arranging its interior. Source goods in town markets or venture into randomized dungeons with an adventurer to fight beasts and collect their loot.Steam player rating: 95% positive from 6,695 reviews.
$1.992025-06-26 · SSteamBase game · same records as the chart above; USD history, not a regional Steam low.
Language support
Language
Interface
Subtitles
Audio
English
Yes
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—
Japanese
Yes
—
Yes
Steam PC edition data · 2026-10-27
02Before you buy
Shopkeeping and dungeons
Manage stock, selling prices and shop design, sourcing goods through town markets or by exploring randomized dungeons with an adventurer.
Modes and language
The single-player game includes Survival and Endless modes after the main game. English is listed as supported for Steam PC; full English audio is not specified.
03Frequently asked questions
What is the goal?
As Recette, earn money through the shop to repay a loan.
How do I get shop stock?
Buy goods through town markets, or explore dungeons with an adventurer and collect loot.
Is there more to do after the main game?
Yes. The description names Survival Mode and Endless Mode as options after beating the game.
Popular Steam reviews
Native-language selection · 10 reviews
Selected helpful reviews in this language show both recommendations and criticisms. This selection does not represent the overall positive rating; opinions reflect the version reviewed.
RecommendedSteam player
I'm a sad man. I'm late-40s and I still like cute things. I also love RPGs, so you can see why I looked at Recettear and liked the look of it.
The game wasn't quite what I thought it was though.... but in a good way. I was pleasantly surprised.
You'd probably be forgiven for thinking as I did - this is a typical JRPG with the theme being centred somehow around a shop. Well, yes it is... and it isn't. The game essentially has two parts to it. The RPG part takes the form of a fairly typical top-down dungeon crawler a la Chocobo's Dungeon, Pokemon Mystery Dungeon and a host of other similar ones. That's about as standard as it gets though.
Recettear does things rather differently - you are a young girl who has inherited her father's item shop which serves the local townsfolk with equipment for their day-to-day use and more importantly, stuff to go a-dungeon-crawling with. You also have a guardian of sorts (who also turns out to be a debt collector too) who's a fairy. Well, this is a Japanese game - 'nuff said. The relevance of this is that Recette (you) have also inherted some burden of debt too, who naturally you owe to your ward. So, the crux of the game is to run the shop, and earn enough each day to enable you to pay off your monthly debt payment.
I know, that might sound a little boring, but it isn't. It's actually where the game really shines. Your day is divided up into a maximum of 4 sections, which you can "spend" by either visiting town for certain things, visit the adventurer's guild (more on that later), or open the shop. Your shop has certain shelf spaces laid out, and arranging the stock so your best stuff is visible from the window is an essential trick. Put the boring, common and cheap items in the window and you'll attract less passers-by. Put the really expensive stuff in the window and you'll also attract less passers-by. It's a balancing act.
Once customers come in, they'll flit around looking, and approach you with items they want to buy from the shelves. As with any real-world store, the trick is to maximize profit, while retaining custom. So, sell higher than you bought it, but low enough so they don't get annoyed and never return - another balancing act. Some customers will ask for certain special orders in advance, which you almost always never have the stock at the time to fulfil, so you make a gamble on whether you can acquire the stock they're asking for - accept and fail, and they'll get annoyed, but refuse and they'll get annoyed too. You can't please everyone...
So where does the stock come from? This is where the adventurer's guild and the dungeon crawling comes in.
Instead of opening the store, you can toddle off to the adventurer's guild where all the adventurers hang out. You can recruit them, for a fee to go and dungeon crawl with you. There's a great element of risk/reward here, as at the end of each level, you can choose to duck out with the loot, or proceed onwards with the chance of more and better loot, but with the added risk of costly failure. As Recette, doesn't fight (well, she's only a girl), you take the role of the adventurer here. Her role is to tag along and store your part of the loot.
So, you fight, you level up your adventurers, you gain better loot to sell for better prices, you get money to pay off your increasing debt, and so on.
There's also some added little nuances such as it being wise to look after the adventurers you are hiring by selling them stuff cheap when they visit your store, as they'll use that stuff when crawling the not-so-murky depths. As the game progresses, you'll need to get a bit inventive in how you manage your stock and customers, but I won't elaborate on that as that would be spoiling things!
It's not an easy game to describe, and it probably sounds a bit dry on the face of it, but if you like the straight up old-school action-RPG dungeon crawler, I wouldn't hesitate to grab this - it does that part of it very well, but the light startegy side of shop management and how it dovetails so very, very nicely is what makes this game utterly unique. I can't recommend it highly enough.
So I have no hesitation in saying this is easily worth £15 on my value-for-money scale.Show moreShow less
15.6 hours at review915 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
I had really been looking forward to this game... but after completing it, I'm sorry to say that I cannot recommend Recettear. You expect there to be more when really the game is pretty shallow.
The Ragnarok Online-ish graphics got me hooked at the start and I liked the no-nonsense dungeon crawling and the shop aspect.. but there's just not enough here to keep you engaged. Or if there is, the game is not organized in such a way that you can enjoy it without a guide.
First of all, the dungeon crawling gets really repetitive. Fighting doesn't require you to be clever, because you're OP all of the time. After you unlock your fourth and final skill on a character.. you switch to a new one because they just get stale.
Worse, dungeon crawling is actually detrimental to your progress, because you rarely find items worth the hassle, but you lose 2 units of ingame time that you could have spent selling stuff in your shop.
The shop system's got a tutorial that makes you haggle with your customers, although suggesting a price they'll like is the only way to get combo bonuses for selling, which are more useful than the extra buck from high sales prices.
I also found it very, very difficult to survive the debt cycle (someone in the comments even asked "So did anyone survive the first round?"). When you can't pay back your debt on time, it's not a complete gameover, but you start again from the beginning, only you keep the items you have in stock and your merchant level (that gives you access to more stuff on the market + other stuff that helps). The second time around is too easy. I finished the last ingame week doing nothing but killing time and still had 1 million pix when I payed off the final debt of 500k. This should be more balanced.
The crafting system is a nice addition, but suffers from a lack of menu integration. You literally have to write stuff down you want to hunt for in the dungeons. Would have been much nicer to be able to pull up a menu and see "Aha. I need 2 more pieces of X to make Y." That's why I ended up using it just to make stuff I had randomly collected the ingredients for. It's very inconvenient.
Sure, I could have played it smarter and looked into a guide to make lots more money by crafting. But honestly? When hunting for the items isn't fun.. why would anyone bother?
All in all, I don't really want to drop a huge pile of dung on this game. It has its enjoyable aspects, but as it is, I just don't think it'll be fun for you. That's why I'm not recommending it. If you like, you can play the demo. But don't expect much more than the content you see there.Show moreShow less
26.3 hours at review55 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
Oh god I'm such a scumbag I just sold a candy to a little girl for several hundred dollars.Show moreShow less
25.7 hours at review677 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
I was interested enough to buy it after playing the demo, but don't feel motivated to keep playing after the first few hours. The main character is a grinning idiot doormat in debt slavery to a fairy who won't tell her the actual amount owed on the family shop. The shop-keeping system is kind of interesting (as I would hope) but quickly bogs down in randomness and odd design choices. For instance, for days on end armor was arbitrarily low-valued, making most of my stock basically impossible to sell at a profit even as a massive debt payment came up. About 1/4 of your customers walk in not to buy anything but to sell you random garbage with insane dialog: "Want this [bowl of stew] I found in the forest?" "It's time to sell this family heirloom, [a chocolate bar]!" (I'm disturbed by the little girl who keeps selling broken god statues.) You get berated if you don't buy these things and lose out on experience point combos. Haggling consists entirely of raising or lowering a number; there's no rhetoric, advertising, personal relationships, competition, offers of throwing X in, &c. Character interaction is entirely scripted and consists of your character grinning against insults and attempted murder.
There\'s an XP/level system for the shopkeeper, unlocking features like expanding the store. That's fine, but according to Internet guides, the actual rules defy both common sense and the actual tutorial. You're supposed to sell at a *minimal* profit because this somehow makes you more experienced and causes your endless array of generic customers and named, abrasive jerks to become richer. The two points I like here are that the shop can have a distinct light/dark or plain/gaudy rating (though this affects almost nothing) and that it's in your interest to give a good price to adventurers wanting to upgrade their equipment (though they also buy equipment they can't use).
You get some of your item stock by hiring adventurers to explore the random dungeons next to town, this being a generic RPG world. In this mode you control the hero while your own character and her debt-master follow passively. At first I liked this gameplay because there's a variety of enemy movement patterns to figure out, requiring some thought to avoid damage. But since you're fighting the same few enemies over and over (red slimes! yellow slimes!) and your tactics mostly consist of "hit with sword" anyway, the novelty wears off and you're back in random dungeon land, where everything is a meaningless grid of halls and rooms and you\'re hoping the random number gods will stop granting you bits of wooden armor when there's a 200,000 coin payment due Thursday. Besides "vendor trash" items you also collect random ingredients that fuel nonsense recipes for turning items into more valuable items. Eg. iron+bug traps to make a cute maiden's bracelet; adventurous clothes plus fur and walnuts or something to make chainmail. The rules don't make sense, there's no real plot, I don't like the characters, and there's not much to the gameplay.
So, at this point I think I'll abscond with my stock of used candy apples and discount armor. Hopefully the fairy won't see me sneak out.Show moreShow less
7.7 hours at review50 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
You think this is a cute little game about running an item shop and having fun, but it's not. It's a game about crippling debt and trying your hardest to claw your way out of it.
The bank comes to your house and tells you that your dumb deadbeat dad is probably dead, and that they're going to repo your house. Instead of making you homeless, the bank fairy just turns you into a slave and turns your house into an item shop (because zoning regulations and child labor laws don't exist here) and you spend the rest of the game trying to make payments to buy your freedom.
Fun game, but god help you if your hustle isn't strong enough. Would not recommend to the capitalistically weak.Show moreShow less
7.2 hours at review583 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
Receattear has you play as a young chick fending for herself with a massive debt to pay off.
And no, she doesn't pay it off that way. She runs a local store!
This game is super fun and *incredibly* addictive. When I started playing this, when I was off work ill, I played it non-stop, and actually dreamed about it for a bit. It gets into your brain.
The mechanics, however, are quite repeatative, and the process of acquiring items for your store is very tedious. The story, though, is charming and enjoyable (if you like JRPG sorts of games, you will appreciate it).
My main criticism is that after 10 hours of play, I failed the game at the last hurdle, after being asked to complete *an impossible challenge* (I think it is anyway). The only way I can deduce to complete the game is to play it *twice*, and fail the first time. You prepare tonnes of items in the first play, really good stuff, and sell large the second run through.
This, to me, is incredibly annoying game design, and is the reason I have not completed, as I refuse to put myself through another playthrough. For this reason, I'd avoid it, but if you can put up with that, then go ahead!
NilesyShow moreShow less
10.3 hours at review42 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
Hey hey people, Sseth hereShow moreShow less
0.9 hours at review557 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
The game is fine but beware: Carpe Fulgur, the translation team behind this game, has been known to make unnecessary changes and edits to the games they translate much like Commie Subs or 4kidz used to do. They do this because the game conflicts with their sensibilities or their particular world view so I would not recommend you support these devs as they censor the games and stray from the source material especially when dialog or scenarios conflict with their extreme-progressive ideologies.
Just something to consider about the quality of the English version’s writing that is important and I didn’t see mentioned before.Show moreShow less
5.3 hours at review36 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
Finally a game where I can live out my fantasies of becoming a merchant who crushes hearts and dreams under the weight of his fat profit margin. Y'all can keep your Poorly-Lit Life Forces 2 or whatever the f♥ck it's called, Recettear blows that all out of the water.
Ok first of all you play as a loli. Don't be deceived--beneath her cute, naive exterior lies a heart as black as coal and a mind as shrewd and cunning as they come. This little sh♥t will bleed you for all you're worth with mark-ups that would make Best Buy blush. And she will love every minute of it as she watches you carry your broke ♥ss out the door with a ham sandwich. Thank you and come again mother f♥cker.
Recette's rise to power begins when her piece of sh♥t dad racks up a dickload of debt and skips town or dies or something I dunno I kind of spaced out at that part BUT THE POINT IS he's an ♥sshole and Recette don't need that sh♥t in her life.
So Tear, this really unprofessionally dressed loan shark fairy with a personality as vivid and exciting as a piece of corrugated cardboard, comes up and is like "yo I'm takin your house."
Long and short of it is that Recette has to open an item shop and earn some money to keep her house from being seized, because Tear is a soulless harpy.
That's how the story begins. And there's a decent amount of depth to the economic aspects of this game. I mean you can't check on the DOW or whatever but this is f♥cking Recettear, not Wolf of Wall Street: The Video Game (someone should get on that tho c'mon nintendo).
There's buying, selling, taking specific orders, taking orders IN ADVANCE (take some time to collect yourself, I know this sh♥t's amazing), and upgrading and changing up your shop.
The fun comes when you can take advantage of a crash in the price of goods to stock up, then wait until their value's jacked up later to sell them off at 250% of their price or higher. I basically gave up masturbation because making bank in this game feels so good.
Different customers have different purchasing behaviors, including limited funds and a certain percentage mark-up they're willing to deal with. Common visitors to your shop include: Finicky House Wife from Hell, Crusty Old Man, Rich-♥ss Regular Guy, and the lovable Broke-♥ss Little Girl.
There are also dungeon crawling segments which you need to hire adventurers for, and to hire them you need to get their card by doing some specific sh♥t to make friends with them. The first dude you get is a lovable street urchin named Louie, and he's....ok I guess. He uses a f♥cking sword like a scrub but whatever you can unlock other people.
Dungeon crawling is how you get free sh♥t and ingredients to make even cooler sh♥t, but you can't really bring much back with you because apparently a f♥cking knapsack is not considered standard issue gear for adventurers.
Overall, this game is exactly what the title tells you it is, and maybe a little more.
I highly reccommend it. Play this sh♥t.
also f♥ck this steam censorship we're all adults come onShow moreShow less
6.8 hours at review510 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
A shop simulator is an interesting concept. Part of it is a dungeon crawler.
Game is extremely cute, music is repetitive.
Dialogs are SO BORING. It seems they didn't know how to be brief or get to the point. As a consecuence, there's walls of text for telling you practically nothing.
Selling and buying items can be confusing sometimes. As a client could be trying to sell you something and the phrase currently on screen does not clearly state it. I bough a couple of overpriced items this way. By the way, clients sometimes want to buy "metal things" but they seem to mean something more specific.
Also, they make orders and, when you get the items and are there for them, they don't want to play even a normal price. The order system is silly: a tracker was needed, and a clear maximum price for the order too.
The dungeon crawler is kind of nice, but very simple. Bosses are good, though, and each one has it's pattern and strategy. But, overall, it gets boring to explore random generated maps until you get to the boss.
But what really ruins it for me is that they make you pay an enormous debt for a house during ONE MONTH. You can barely play the dungeon crawler. After that, additional game modes are unlocked, such as keep playing without having to pay the debt. But... without the debt, why do I need to manage the shop? Uh, oh... I can play the dungeon crawler then, but... It's a very simple one. Maybe I should be playing a real dungeon crawler. A good one.
This game is chasing two rabbits.Show moreShow less
14.6 hours at review26 people found this helpful
Source: original Steam user reviews. Helpful votes are an archived snapshot, not live data. Last collected: 08/15/2026.
