Do you enjoy learning how technology works under the hood, contributing to a society in a small but meaningful way, and doing repetitive, comfortingly banal tasks? To put it another way: are you a cozy gamer who loves a chill job simulator? Restory: Chill Electronics Repairs is just the ticket for folks who want to tinker with old cellphones, kitchen appliances, and gaming consoles of all shapes and sizes but without the fear of irreparably mucking it up (and without the inevitable dust allergies!). Restory offers impressively realistic simulacra of familiar brands but without the hassle of keeping track of all those loose screws or the stress of resoldering and potentially ruining broken computer chips. It’s beautifully zen, allowing the player to sink into mono-zukuri (the art of craftsmanship, especially with meticulous attention to detail and quality) like a warm bubble bath.
You play as the new master of an electronics repair shop in a relatively quiet neighborhood in Tokyo. You start as a novice without any specialty licenses or equipment. Your landlord has some requests for you that kick off the main story plot, and your upstairs neighbor has a big request that gives you a broad goal to work towards in terms of repair experience, and a colorful cast of characters, including a klutzy little girl, a maid cafe waitress, a yakuza, and a rock star, brings you plot beats and plot-specific items to fix, clean, and paint. You can also accept online orders from strangers just for practice or to bank more money to buy upgraded tools and cute desk toys. You learn to buy cheap inventory on legally distinct eBay so you can frankenstein parts when someone needs a replacement motor or disc drive or watch band, and you can upgrade your own equipment so you can work faster and churn out more orders in a day (but again, the whole point is to chill out, so don’t concern yourself too much with efficiency!).
The pacing is quite different from many Western stories and games, both in terms of the plot advancement and the tutorializing of tools and techniques. In my playthrough, it took me about two and a half hours to finally feel like the plot kicked in. The mailman would chat with me for tutorial purposes and would drop off a bill to pay for a device to fix. Other than that, I was getting one character with a storyline every two or three in-game days. I felt like I was just spinning my wheels and noodling around, fixing machines without purpose. It felt drudgingly slow to me.
But I hit my stride at the 2.5 hour mark, and the thing is, I don’t think any of that changed. I think I changed. I finally got it. I was supposed to go about my days cleaning and repairing equipment, reveling in the tiny joy of unscrewing a part and hearing the telltale clacking noises of it coming apart and revealing the next layer underneath, picking up one piece at a time and dusting it with my little brush until it gleams. That’s the point. The story does come along eventually, but it waits for me to get comfortably seated, so to speak.
Once I got to that stage, I found it incredibly refreshing. So many games, especially cozy games in the past few years, rush into giving the player every single mechanic and character and motive, and it can be overwhelming. Games like Stardew Valley and Breath of the Wild show the player a world, but it’s up to the player to explore and learn at their own pace. Restory pulls off the same feeling, which is especially impressive given that you never leave your tiny shop. There’s a saying that there are two ways of experiencing the entire world: you can travel absolutely everywhere and talk to every person, or you can stay absolutely still and fully experience everything the one spot has to offer. Restory offers the second option. I finally started to fully enjoy the experience of taking apart, cleaning, fixing, and reassembling, and taking the scraps of story as they arrive every 2-3 days like snail mail letters.
The spell did start to lose me towards the end because there was a significant pacing mismatch that rankled me. I mentioned there were two main story threads: a story told by the quirky cast of characters and the repair experience progression. I had thought I was dovetailing the two, but these storylines finished in a way that made me believe I was close to the end of the game when I actually wasn’t. In my notes, I described the feeling as having rescued Zelda, but I hadn’t even made it to Hyrule Castle to confront Ganon. There is truly no way to rush the pacing. The game enforces chillness at a maximum of one storybeat per day. Thus, my recommendation is to lean into the chill. Do not try to rush, for you cannot. Enjoy the ride, one clean electronic part at a time.
Given the zen-ness of the gameplay, I expected the story to be equally, well, chill. It isn’t. One could argue the characters are realistic for the time period and the Tokyo neighborhood. The landlord is sketchy. The waitress is a scammer and pickpocket. She puts up with weaboo stalkers who come to the shop after her, seeking your help in harassing her (you never do—that’s one choice the game makes for you). Another character is a fairly aggressive drunk you can’t shake. With such a colorful cast, the story has an absolutely Shakespearean level of drama and missed connections and misunderstood messages. It’s engaging and zany! However, it is also worth giving content warnings for all of these characters. Depending on the player, they may not appreciate a surprise encounter with a triggering situation like workplace sexual harassment or alcoholism.
Regarding the realm of audio, this game has delightful sound effects for all the screwing and spraying and clicking. The sound effects are where it shines. The characters are voice acted but only with vocalese ‘barks’ (little “hrmmm”s and “oh”s), which breathes life and individuality into the cast in a perfectly pleasant way. The soundtrack is perfectly innocuous and also diegetic, which is a nice treat. The music only plays when you turn on the radio, giving you full control. It’s fairly banal and pleasant, which is perfect for this kind of game. It’s also forgettable enough that if you’re the kind of player who likes to put on your own soundtrack, you can absolutely do so and you will not lose out on anything from the experience. Just keep the radio off so you still get all the fantastic sound effects, but choose your own playlist or podcast and have fun!
An accessibility issue I had with the game was the zoom level. When picking up pieces, you can use the scroll wheel on the mouse to zoom in. It’s very intuitive and helpful, especially when concentrating on drawing a perfectly straight line with solder! However, there were several tiny pieces that remained quite small at full zoom. I had to wear my reading glasses to see some of the tiny solder lines (this bit about my glasses is going to become my catch phrase and my common metric for legibility, I swear…). Luckily, I did not have the inverse issue with large pieces. Nothing ever zoomed in comically far or became unwieldy. But those tiny pieces didn’t scale enough for my comfort level when playing, and I had to lean forward to make sure I was looking at it the right way. The chillness of the game had invited me to lean back in my chair with just my right arm straight out on the mouse, but the lack of proper zoom would bring me back up to a proper seated position. Sure, maybe it’s better for my back, but sometimes I just wanted to vibe in the zero-G position, and I needed proper zoom levels for that.
As I have alluded to, this is playable (and I think ideally so) with mouse and keyboard. I’m not sure how well it would play with a controller—to be completely honest, I didn’t even try. The only tasks are advancing dialog with a click and holding the click button to unscrew or rescrew and to drag objects around. There’s also a simple yet elegant hint system: press the spacebar to highlight the area that needs attention next. It can be easy to lose track of the bits and bobs as you rotate the object and remove components. Pressing the spacebar simply adds a yellow highlight around the screws that still need unscrewing or the piece that needs cleaning to get you back on track. As a bonus point, the spacebar is really the only time I had to use the keyboard. Otherwise, the game is entirely playable with a mouse, so gamers can easily play one-handed.
A last note. There was some hullabaloo about whether or not the team used AI during development. That’s partly why this review comes almost a month after the release date—I paused playing until more information was published. So Many Games avoids reviewing games that explicitly use AI assets. The key art is indeed different from the game itself, which is a common marketing technique that is especially fraught with suspicion in the current age of rampant generative AI. This has thankfully been addressed by the development team, and as it stands, the current version of the game has no AI assets, and AI is not actively used in the gameplay. This is my diplomatic attempt to acknowledge the accusations and discussions and to assert that, to the best of my knowledge, ReStory is acceptably within So Many Games’ review policy terms. For a summary of the situation, please see GameGrin’s short article published August 16, 2026.
