Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale
Worth it · RPG · 2010
Steam Deck UnsupportedThe verdict
BUY IT.
Worth it at $19.99, a BANGER if it drops to $17.49.
- Length
- 13.2h
- Value
- $1.51/hr
- Reviews
- 96% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 256 MB of memory, 696 MB of storage. Windows only.
Recettear is the story of an item shop, the girl who lives in it, and the fairy who turned her life upside down. Recette Lemongrass finds herself in charge of an item shop built into her house, in order to pay back a loan her father took and then skipped out on - and Tear, her newfound fairy "companion", won't take no for an answer!
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
June 2025 is where it bottomed out, at $1.99. Its cuts run 80 percent off as a rule. There have been 47 in the 14 years tracked, about 15 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 13 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 15 weeks. Past sales have already crossed the $17.49 BANGER line 47 times.
On value it sits in the top 1 percent of its genre. It is pricier than 90 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 99 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Soda Dungeon 2 (free, scores 84) beats it on value, while it beats Dragon Cliff ($9.99, scores 77).
The press gave it 82; the people who bought it give it 96 percent. A 14-point gap in the buyer's favour.
2 of the 402 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written April 2020 to August 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 84 percent of the 408 reviews written there were positive, against 96 percent overall, and those are 6 percent of everything written about it.
13.2 hours to finish it, 50 to exhaust it. The completionist tail is 3.8 times the campaign.
Players
12 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
The publisher is dead and this game is amazing. Delisting will probably happen in the near future.
A remarkably charming game. I love it but the dungeon crawling can be a little too time-consuming.
Combat is clunky and unsatisfying and bosses aren't even close to being scaled to the rest of their dungeon. It's ridiculous that I can skate through four floors of regular enemies only to lose virtually all of my spoils to a boss that takes one point of damage per hit. Recommendation to avoid.
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: achievement curve (Steam global achievements).
Cite this score
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale scores 83/100 on the BANG Score (worth it). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/70400/recettear-an-item-shop-s-taleThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Jul 30, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.