Restory: Chill Electronics Repairs review for PC

Restory: Chill Electronics Repairs is a fun game for anyone with a little bit of a spot for a bit of tinkering in their brain. It’s got everything a nostalgic 30-something could want when thinking back on the games of their childhood. “Oh how simple it was then” you might tell yourself, dreaming on the days in the past where you can remember repairing an electronic device being as simple as just undoing a couple screws and jumbling a few pieces. That’s exactly what Restory: Chill Electronics Repairs aims to not only remind you of, but put you in the shoes of apparently the one guy in Japan who’s actually able to do this competently.

Restory takes place in Akihabara, Japan; tech capital of the world if you believe the stories. You are a mostly unnamed character, simply referred to by most people that pass by as “Master” (As in master of your craft, not as in they obey your whims). You run a tech repair shop in “the early 2000s” and are lead through a path of interactions that have you meeting and learning about a handful of characters about the town, as well as the ways they are familiar with one another. I wouldn’t call the story very deep, but it’s at least sufficiently interesting enough to carry you through the game. For my part, it took me about 10 hours of play to reach “the end”, but it’s kind of an open ended game, so the fun comes from what you make of it.

Throughout the length of the story, you’ll work your way through repairing various close-but-not-exact reflections of real world electronics from throughout various periods of the early 2000s. The game makes sure to never give you an exact year, so it can get a little liberal with the kinds of things you are given as repairs. Simple things like a Tomagatchi or an Atari joystick might cross your desk early on, but as you do more, you’ll be purchasing more licenses to be allowed to access more and more allowances to repair things. Later in Restory’s storyline, you’ll be repairing old Dell Thinkpads or Polaroid cameras and… for how simple Restory makes some of the things seem to disassemble, all I have to say is that I’m afraid of what it actually looks like to repair a polaroid camera if this is the easy version.

Essentially the gameplay loop is a very simple one: you either get a job to repair something that is given to you, or you buy a broken item from your computer, then you take it apart, clean it, replace broken parts, and then sell it or return it for the repair fee. In essence, there’s not much to it, but I do feel like it was quite a bit of fun in my time spent playing. The interactions, animations, and mechanics are all made very smooth and unobtrusive, so there’s little to complain about across the board. If there was anything for me to have as a wish, it would probably just be the inclusion of more hotkeys. Rather than having to click around to get your brush or change to the soldering iron, it’d be nice to have some keys to quick switch. Oh, and also maybe some wish for the parts washer you unlock after a little saving up to be just a little less “kool-aid man” in the way it busts into the work mat when I accidentally mouse over it and it pushes all my meticulously placed parts into a pile.

But those are just minor nitpicks, Restory: Chill Electronics Repairs is all very chill and casual across the board for the largest part of the game. Not much to speak of in the way of deadlines, everything can be done at your own pace. Only exception being the online orders you take for repairs, which have a very very generous 3 day maximum. I never even came close to running out of time on one of them, so it in no way affected the casual nature of the overall experience. If you do fancy yourself a challenge though, make sure you get your reassembly skills down pat for when you get to the end of the game, as I’ll just say that there are definitely opportunities to put your wits to the test if you so desire. But it’s purely optional, so don’t fret if you’re a casual gamer just looking to relax.

I find it hard to say much of anything negative about Restory: Chill Electronics Repairs. It was a good time, and I spent another good 5 hours playing after wrapping up the story line, just enjoying the loop of cleaning, repairing, and selling. It’s a good system and I hope to see some updates or expansions after release. At my time of writing, they do have a Steam news line that mentions they’ve got their first content update on the horizon, so let’s hope it brings some fun new things! Restory: Chill Electronics Repairs is priced very fairly, at a mere $20, so if you are someone that this concept sounds interesting to, I would absolutely recommend you give it a shot.