Restory: Chill Electronics Repair

PC, iOS. Played on Steam Deck and PC with XBox controller for review.

Somewhere in the marketing for ReStory is the promise that it's "chill." I've played enough work simulators to know that word usually means "the money comes in slowly," so I went in suspicious. I wasn't ready for a game that would have me hunched over a virtual workbench at one in the morning, gently prying the back off a flip phone with the care of a bomb technician who had found religion.

The premise is simple. You run a small electronics repair shop in mid-2000s Tokyo, and the people of the neighbourhood bring you their broken things. Consoles, handhelds, music players, cameras, digital pets on their last pixelated breath. You take them apart, find the fault, clean, replace, reassemble and return them, then take the money and buy better tools. Repeat until the sun comes up or your partner asks what you're doing, whichever comes first.

Work simulators tend to fall into two camps. Some make you feel competent, and some make you feel like you've taken on a second job without the superannuation. Turkish developer Mandragora, who previously made I Am Future, have firmly landed in the first camp. The disassembly is tactile and deliberate. Screws come out one at a time and go into a tray, and nothing is rushed. There's no foreman, no shift timer and no customer tapping on the counter. The game trusts you to work at the pace of someone who actually likes this sort of thing, and not too surprising, it turns out I do.

The point was driven home midway through my playthrough, when the garage door remote, a device that has served the household faithfully since roughly the Howard government, chose that moment to die. Ordinarily this would mean a trip to the hardware store and a futile internet search for the remote's manufacturer. Instead, I found myself at the kitchen bench, prying the casing apart with a butter knife, wiping years of grime from the contacts and swapping out the battery with the steady hands of a seasoned professional. It was only as I snapped the last piece of casing back into place that I noticed I was waiting for something. A "Perfect!" was supposed to flash up in front of my eyes, and somewhere an unseen tally was meant to tick over by one. Neither arrived. The real world, it turns out, has terrible UI feedback. I went back inside and fixed a Pokia instead, where my work is appreciated.

The real hook is the era. The parody hardware is pitched just right, recognisable enough to set off the nostalgia but bent enough to stay on the right side of the lawyers. The "Pokia" brick phone got a genuine laugh out of me, and I have opinions about the "Nony PlayMachine" that I'll save for the podcast. The officially licensed Atari gear is a nice touch for those of us who remember when a console was a wood-panelled piece of furniture. You’ll start with simple Tomogatchi-likes and work your way through familiar looking phones from the 90’s and early 2000’s. Walkmans, PlayStations, Furby’s even electric kettles, will all be left in your trust to clean and repair.

Then there are the customers, who give the busywork its purpose. Each device comes with a small story attached, and in a game made almost entirely of screws and solder, those stories are what turn repairing into restoring. It's a modest narrative ambition, but a well-judged one. You're not saving the world. You're saving somebody's photos, which is often more than the world deserves.

Far more interesting than the story presented is the emergent gameplay that develops. I found myself repairing a walkie-talkie device and lacked two parts to complete the repair. In the game you can open a browser to order parts, or go to another website where you can buy broken donor devices to recover parts from. The parts simply were not available, nor were broken walkie-talkies. It was the last day the repair was due, and I did not want to upset the customer. It then occurred to me that I could accept an online order to clean and repair someone else’s walkie-talkie! I quickly accepted the order, opened the package and dismantled the walkie-talkie I was meant to clean and finished the first job. Customer satisfied with a job well done, not knowing that the corgi they just picked up from the vet had a kidney of a schnauzer. Panic of course then set in as my problem spiraled out of control — where would I get the replacement parts for the second customer? By accepting another repair job of course!

If there's a complaint, it's that the shop management sits lightly on top of the repair work rather than pushing back against it. Those wanting spreadsheets and supply chain crises should look elsewhere. But ReStory isn't selling tension. It's selling the satisfaction of a job done properly, and few games deliver that as cleanly. Bill have to be paid and come regularly, but there is no stress in the business work, just the repair work.

ReStory is the rare work simulator that makes work feel like a privilege rather than a punishment. It's a quiet, tactile, generous little game, and the best argument for owning a precision screwdriver set since owning a precision screwdriver set.

- Phil Fogg

7.5/10

Note from Phil Fogg About This Review: no Sony Walkmans were harmed in the writing of this review, though several were mildly inconvenienced.