Recettear is a silly, fun, and surprisingly deep game about being the shop owner in an RPG adventuring town. Windows-only, and allergic to most netbooks due to the mostly-invisible use of heavy 3D graphics (honestly, it looks like it should run on ancient hardware, but somehow all sorts of crap is getting linked in), but worth booting up a VMware session or less-anemic laptop for (my Lenovo S12 w/ION handles it just fine).

Full review when I can manage to stop playing it for a while…

Short take: extensive free demo, clean enough for kids, earbug-worthy background music, full English translation with limited Japanese vocals, unusual default keyboard controls, no DRM if you don’t buy through Steam. Gameplay mixes customer relationship management, Econ 101, and casually-paced dungeon-crawling. The only time you can’t just save and come back is in the middle of a dungeon, but there are town portals every five levels.

“Capitalism, ho!”

[The Japanese developers were also responsible for the brilliantly-named ElePaper Action]

[Update: okay, not 100% kid-safe…]