Carpe Fulgur had the bad judgement to release Recettear: An item Shop’s Tale while I was traveling. But that’s okay. Recette and her mob-connected business fairy, Tear, would wait. Painting the shelves. That chocolate bar melting in the window was this guy’s inheritance from his grandmother. “Sell it,” she told him, “if you ever need the money.”

It had been in his family for generations, and he hated to let it go. Bring up the offer just a touch and he might part with it.

To recap the game a little, Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale is the story of a young girl, Recette, whose adventurer father borrows a large sum of money from the mob and promptly disappears, never to be seen again (as far as I know). Tear, the mob fairy, gets in contact with Recette fairly soon and informs her that the collateral for her father’s loan was the family home, which is now forfeit. This is a bit of a shock for Recette, who was just getting used to being alone in the world. Now she’s alone and homeless. Tear takes pity, and gives her a month to repay the loan — which is so substantial that she can’t tell Recette just how much it is (I estimate well over 1,000,000 pix — pix being the currency of the land). Tear suggests she turn the house into an item shop and sell things to adventurers and townspeople and so on. Perhaps hire adventurers to go into dungeons and get things for them to sell.

The demo covers the first week, and gives you some of the flavor of the full game. You’ll have little trouble exploring the first dungeon with your hired adventurer or making your first 10,000 pix payment (grats! You have paid off 1% of your debt!). You have a good feeling. You laughed at Tear’s businesslike nature and Recette’s obliviousness to her situation. You kinda felt weird about the Merchant Guild guildmaster who sells stuff cheap to Recette and then shows up at the store to buy it all back later.

But you haven’t met the Mouse with a Grudge (and a huge crowbar). Having a grudge only gets you so far. Having a grudge and a crowbar, well — now you’re making your point. You haven’t met the cyborg girl who doesn’t understand the difference between “taking” and “buying”. You haven’t met the kimono-clad lady who keeps trying to find her way home and just ending up deeper in dungeons. You haven’t met Recette’s arch-rival and best customer, Alouette. You haven’t been yet told that Recette is too short to own an item shop (but, strangely, the fairy Tear is tall enough).

And you probably haven’t had to sleep in a cardboard box after your home was repossessed.

Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale is just good, clean family fun. It’s available now from Impulse, Steam and Gamer’s Gate. I bought mine at Impulse — no DRM, and you can copy it to any PC. Any of YOUR PCs — don’t pirate, buy! Best $20 you’ll spend this month.

Anyway, here’s some hints:

Dungeons can drop decent gear, but you’ll find better (more profitable) stuff in the market or the merchant’s guild. Your BEST stuff, the stuff that will make you rich, is crafted in the forge with “fusion”, using items dropped in dungeons combined with items bought. You’ll need fusion to win the game.

I tend to go dungeon diving every couple of days for raw materials, do whatever fusion I can, then spend a couple of days tending shop. Now that I have leveled enough to need to fill advance orders, the days I must spend in the shop are more or less fixed.

The customers have certain percentages of base value at which they will sell or buy. Naturally, these values change based on the demand. Don’t worry about losing the little girl as a customer. I always sell her the cheapest stuff. Advance orders are golden. They’ll buy whatever you hand them, as long as it fits their general needs. No matter how expensive it is.

Jade Way: First Boss: King Slime. Drops Slime Liver, which you’ll need for fusion and an advance order. Takes damage in inverse proportion to its size. Kill it when it’s small.

Jade Way: Second Boss: Reginald Drisby. Whacks you with the crowbar if you’re in front of him, occasionally sends out nasty bubbles. He likes mushrooms. Red mushrooms heal him, purple mushrooms knock him out. Kill all the red mushrooms as they pop, and get behind him and let loose with the back hits when he falls over.

Alouette will buy things for a lot of money. Gouge her mercilessly. Her fairy, though, is a cheapskate.

Tremendously, actively fun Japanese import “Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale” has finally gained a publisher! Stardock will publish Recettear through its Impulse digital distribution network. Ten thousand people downloaded the demo after the gaming media gave it rave reviews (including me), which got translators Carpe Fulgur enough pull to get a major distributor interested.

Good job, guys — I absolutely cannot wait to play the full game!

Founder Andrew Dice broke the news on the Recettear forums today:

Carpe Fulgur and Recettear have received a lot of great press. We’ve now got a legion of fans who are pretty much howling for the release of the full game. We even have cosplayers, which is a little bit staggering.

And yet, it’s been something of a struggle to get distributors to take us seriously. An indie game from Japan, localized by a pack of nobodies? Are they for real? Why would we want to carry their game that nobody would want to buy?

Well. Ten thousand demo downloads in under a month don’t lie. Quality, we hope, doesn’t lie. And now one distributor has said: “Yes, they’re for real. And we’ll help them.”

After a month of hand-wringing, we are pleased to announce that Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale will be sold on Stardock’s Impulse platform. Stardock has been a supporter of independent software development for over a decade and we’re thrilled to be going up on Impulse.

Recettear will be available for purchase on Impulse for the price of 20 USD in North America, 15 Euros in the European Union and 13 GBP in Great Britain, and is tentatively scheduled for release on September 10th, 2010. This date may change slightly depending on certain factors involved with the QA process for both Carpe Fulgur and Impulse, but that is the current target date.

We couldn’t have gotten this far without the support of our fans. You guys allow us to seize the lightning, and now it has been seized. We may announce more distributors in the future, but either way, Recettear is coming!

If I could, I’d be playing Recettear right now. (It’s pronounced Reh-keh-teer, not RACKETEER! How could you even think such a thing?) It’s only out as a demo right now, and I’ve played the heck out of that.

Now and again you come across a game that turns the whole standard RPG tropes on their edge and come at them from a different angle. Dungeon Keeper had you building dastardly, trap and monster infested dungeons that lured clueless adventurers in with dreams of easy loot but gave them nothing but messy deaths. In My Life as a King, you take on the role of the town-stranded NPC who gives adventurers their quests. And in Racettear, you play the handy merchant always willing to sell a needy adventurer a handy sword or to buy some slime (+2!) from them.

Recette is a young girl with a song in her heart (called “Capitalism Ho!”) and a fairy by her side. The fairy, Tear, is a debt collector (fairies always get the jobs nobody else wants). She wants Recette’s house. Recette’s dad left her when she was a child to seek out the life of an adventurer! With visions of stacks and piles of gold soon to come his way, he took out a substantial loan with his house as collateral, set off, and was never seen again.

Eventually Terme Finance came a’calling, wondering when they could expect to get paid. Tear, the contractor Terme hired to do the dirty job, couldn’t put Recette out of her home without giving her at least a CHANCE to repay her debt, so she suggests to the girl that they turn the house into an item shop, make friends with the local merchant’s guild and see if, via market manipulation and cheating customers, Terme can get their money and Recette can keep her house (and embark on a lucrative career!)

Sitting around behind a store counter can get DULL, and sometimes money doesn’t come in fast enough. Hang around the Adventurer’s Guild long enough, though, and you might make friends with adventurers who could use a good sponsor and maybe a not-so-rusty sword and shield with which to crawl through a dungeon or three. Recette can keep all the loot she can carry out of there to use in the shop. Great deal!

You can lend adventurers gear, or just sell it to them if they come to the shop. To ensure your investment isn’t wasted, Recette and Tear will follow their hired hand through dungeons, always right there to collect any and all treasure that pops up. If necessary, they can carry the fallen adventurer out of the dungeon and find a rez for him — but they can only manage to bring one bit of loot out with them should that happen.

Each week, Tear will demand a payment, which rises each week. Eventually, Recette won’t be able to make a payment, and she’ll be sent to live in a cardboard box, having lost her home. The game doesn’t end there; Recette can choose to go back to Day 2 and start over again, keeping her merchant levels and her relations with the adventurers in the guild.

The dungeons that seem horribly unbalanced the first time through will be possible the second time. You can’t exit the dungeon with your ill-won gains any time you like, you see, and your first adventurer will have a tough time surviving to the first exit point.

Eventually, you’ll expand your shop and design it to look just as you like, all the adventurers in town will flock to buy your extremely high-priced goods and eagerly sell you their own loot for a ridiculously generous discount. And you’ll be able to repay Terme Finance. And then?

Translators Carpe Fulgur (“Seize the Lightning”) are porting the original game by Japanese indie developers EasyGameStation to English as their first development effort. Due out sometime this year, it will have full text translation, a new theme song and loads of humor that is actually funny. It’s otherwise unchanged from the Japanese original, where it was apparently intended for the console market, as the screen resolution is fairly low and the preferred controller is a PC gamepad. (Keyboards work, too).

The game will not have any copy protection, but they do ask that you do buy it legally with real money once they find a distributor (Steam is mentioned). If buying Recettear means we’ll see more wonderful little indie gems make their way to our shores, it’d be worth it just for that. That it’s also a fun, addicting, one-more-move kind of game is just very tasty icing on the cake.

Download the demo, see what you think.