EasyGameStation has announced via a Twitter post that an updated version of 2007’s roguelite item shop dungeon crawler game, Recettear is on its way. Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale HD Edition will release sometime in 2025 on PC.
Don’t get your hopes up too far, however. This looks less like a remaster and more like a re-release. At least, if the screenshots attached to the tweet are any indication. I mean, truly, Recettear wasn’t technically HD when it was released. It ran at 1280×960 at most, so it wasn’t widescreen, and you’d typically keep it in a window. The screenshots are, at the very least, widescreen resolution. It’s hard to tell if they reach 1920×1080 resolution because the attached shots are formatted in the web-friendly 1200×675. I’m going to say it’s safe to assume the game will reach, at the very slightest, full-HD.
Regardless, the items and textures pictured still aren’t all that crisp. I know that may sound a bit picky, but the geometry hasn’t changed either, so it’s not like fixing the fuzz would be all that demanding. I’m just saying it looks the same. It could be that development is somewhat early on, and everything will be replaced, but let’s manage expectations here. It’s possible that the framework of the first release of Recettear was just obsolete and needed a rebrush, and I would agree. I guess it’s hard to communicate that change without relaunching it as “HD.”
Anyway, if you aren’t familiar, Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale is a 2007 Doujin game that reached fame in the West with a 2010 translation. You play as Recette, who has inherited her father’s massive amounts of debt following his disappearance. A fairy, Tear, appears to collect on the debt, and this results in Recette reopening her father’s shop, naming it a combination of her and Tear’s names: Recettear. This is supposed to be a pun on the word Racketeer, but I personally feel like it’s too much of a stretch.
The game is great, however. You hire adventurers to delve dungeons for you to find loot that you can sell in your shop. The dungeons are randomly generated, and it gives a risk/reward dynamic as you search for better loot. As you progress, you get access to different adventurers with different skills to shake things up.
I played quite a lot of it back in the day. And, to be honest, a modernized upgrade would probably be enough to get me to play it again, even if the visuals wind up looking mostly the same.
Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale HD Edition will release sometime in 2025. At least, the Japanese version will. No word on an English localization, but with how things are these days, it will probably happen.
