InKONBINI review: a game that was too bland for my liking

Today I’m reviewing inKONBINI: One Store. Many Stories, a slice-of-life game set in a small town in Japan in the 1990s. Play as Makoto, who’s covering the night shift at her aunt’s convenience store (konbini), meet customers and stock shelves. This is a spoiler-free review so you can read on even if you haven’t played it.

Despite having several aspects I appreciated about the game and high expectations after playing the demo earlier this year, ultimately it wasn’t a game for me, and I will go into that later on.

Thank you Beep Company, Inc. for providing me with a review key!

The story & gameplay

The game starts off showing you, playing as Makoto, working a night shift in Honki Ponki, your aunt’s convenience store. You’re a college student during summer break, helping your aunt who is away on a short vacation.

During that first shift on your own, you stock some shelves according to your aunt’s instructions. After opening the shop, you meet your first (recurring) customer, Chief, who you help with picking a new brand of instant ramen and food for his cat. The game does a good job here of easing you in into the mechanics without a tutorial. The checkout process is one of my favorite parts of the game. There’s just something so satisfying about getting each item scanned, the little beep that comes with it and counting the change.

It still surprises me how cozy games frequently manage to turn such mundane things into relaxing experiences.

Throughout the game, you go through 7 shifts in the store, and you slowly get to know different customers, hearing their stories and through dialogue options, give them your perspective or advice. Each day also looks different when it comes to the shop management: one day you might need to place some orders over the phone or fill in a box with specific products that your day shift coworkers asked you to, among other tasks you receive through written notes.

Something I want to emphasize is that the game is extremely low stakes. If you don’t stack a shelf as you’re asked to, or if you put an item in the wrong place, the worst thing that can happen is hearing a comment from one of the customers about it or have them ask you to pick up a product for them. The game was designed clearly with the narrative and interactions with customers first and foremost, and the store management as the backdrop.

Attention to detail in the graphics and sound

I absolutely loved the graphics and music in inKONBINI. The art direction really achieved that very specific 90s nostalgia feeling. The designs of the old style cash register and landline phone were really neat. The animations of the customers walking around in the shop switching their baskets from one had to another were a nice detail.

I played the game on my Steam Deck and it ran flawlessly. Though I could hear the fans going at some point, I didn’t experience any performance hiccups. The controls for the most complex tasks like placing and taking items from shelves or switching between the ones in your basket worked well for me.

The design for each of the products in the shop had an incredible level of detail, from the mangas and magazines to the drinks and snacks. It even made me question if they were real life products. Some of them were clear references, like the chocolate mushrooms, so I wonder how many references just flew over my head for not living in Japan.

The music really helped set the scene in the game. Starting from the acoustic backdrop in the menu, to the music that played in the shop during each day with its mellow guitar. I can easily see myself listening to this soundtrack for hours, and romanticizing my life while I’m at it.

I needed more

While I played inKONBINI, I felt that my expectations weren’t being met, and even though it is a short game (I completed it in about 5 hours), the end dragged for me. I attribute that feeling to three main reasons: a personal disconnect with the storytelling, a lack of deeper mechanics and the (too) low stakes.

With each customer, you’re listening to their stories and providing advice that is received as wise and useful. I felt a big disconnect because of that as it didn’t feel genuine at times that I, as a young college student, would be dispensing life advice to people with way more life experience than me. Maybe that’s why my favorite character was Satoshi, a young boy with big ambitions.

I kept wondering if I would have felt more connected to the story and characters had it been voice acted. Voice acting adds nuance in ways that plain text can’t, and it might’ve helped me understand Makoto better.

Even though I liked the concept of combining a (sort of) visual novel, narrative game with convenience store management, I wished these different components carried more weight. I wanted that my dialogue choices affected what comes later on, or at least that my work in the shop had bigger repercussions. While I found it satisfying to stack the shelves and find products to recommend to the customers, the gameplay slowly felt less and less engaging due to the low stakes.

The game also missed a couple of opportunities to add more engaging mechanics, for example: there’s a gachapon (capsule toy) machine outside the store, but once you interact with it, you just get a cutscene of your character picking up the toy rather than a more interactive moment like a mini-game. This made it less likely for me to interact with the machine repeatedly and collect the toys, since I couldn’t skip that cutscene.

To summarize, I would have enjoyed the game more if the story and/or mechanics had more flavor. Both were way too bland and I ended up feeling “nothing I do here really matters, so what’s the point?”.

Could this be a game for you?

If you’re looking for a relaxing game with a light story and gameplay, and the idea of connecting with customers and learning their stories seems appealing to you, inKONBINI could be a good pick. I definitely recommend checking out the demo on Steam if you can, it allows you to experience the first shift (and the rest of the shifts don’t get too far from it).

If you’d rather play a choices-matter game or a store management with stakes, I would suggest playing another title.

Thank you for reading,

-Luna

Images of the game in this post were either provided in the press kit or screenshots I’ve taken.