This review of ReStory: Chill Electronics Repairs was written by Michelle AKA NexusGoblin, an avid tech repair fan and reader.
At one point I had a retail job that I actually enjoyed. The atmosphere of an independent game store is a unique one, doubly so if you get to work there. I, personally, had a lot of downtime in between cleaning and helping customers, and one of the things that I started doing was attempting to fix the mountain of broken controllers we had in the back. A pile of unwanted castoffs that we had tried to sell to people who wanted to tinker but mostly had just collected dust.
By the time I was no longer at that job, I had taught myself how to fix a wide range of things, from controllers to consoles, and it became one of my favorite things to do. So imagine my excitement when a game devoted to fixing and cleaning tech was announced; finally there would be a cleaning game where I enjoyed it as much in-game as I do in real life!
ReStory: Chill Electronic Repairs has you running a small little electronics repair shop in a neighborhood in mid-2000s Tokyo. Right away the story lets you know something is going on, both from the rather suspicious garbage you clear away in your new space and the early visitors implying that the Repair Master that you replaced disappeared.
I was not expecting much of a story, as with other chill cleaning games; they tend to be rather lighthearted and kind of quick to get through. Immediately being hit with the fact that I’m now working in an area where I have cops nosing around and a slew of phones needing to be fixed unquestionably had me overly interested.
I rather like the bold choice of making a relaxing game and giving it storylines where you are left deciding if you’re keeping your mouth shut or helping out, even if it does occasionally add a bit of tension. It surprised me further to see that there are different endings and even some smaller branching paths to follow. If you would like to replay the storyline, there are at least a few key differences to make the next run feel a bit different.
The characters are a lively bunch, from an energetically hopeful postal carrier to a reclusive character that is your upstairs neighbor and only communicates through a bucket on a rope. True to form, you also get some little references to other media here as well, for if you have seen or read The Way of the Househusband, then you will definitely recognize the ‘household operations manager’ Kaito, who has rigid standards to upkeep and will do anything to get his appliances to fall in line (by giving them to you to repair).
As you move through the story, the cast of characters expands, and you start to see the life of Akiba, all without ever leaving your little shop. It’s a town on the decline; money and infrastructure issues abound, and the people are just trying to get by in a world where a small community is considered a business opportunity rather than a home.
Storylines involving suspicious characters and conspiracy aside, the core mechanic here is the repairing, and ReStory really focuses on the details. The early projects you get access to are some simple phones like the Pokia 3310 and the Eggogatchi (Nokia 3310 and Tamogotchi riffs), simple little gadgets that are easy to fix up, clean, and return to their owners; and admittedly tech I’ve never cracked open myself. But when I got to the gaming consoles, I could feel myself simultaneously smiling and feeling a little bit of dread, just like the good old days. How dusty would it be? How much of it would be unusable?
Right away, I realized the devs behind ReStory know what they’ve made, and after finishing the game, I discovered they even had a few fun videos of them taking apart an Atari CX40 controller to show off how close it was to a real thing. The Atari 2600 in-game is just about a one-to-one experience, minus having to solder things back in place (I wish you could just pop things into a board without soldering).
By the time I got to the Xii-Box and its controller, I was fully expecting it to be close, but popping the case open and seeing that massive ribbon cable and the dozens of screws I was going to have to remove to get the broken pieces pretty much solidified this game as one ‘made for me.’
The gameplay loop is simple and one that fits the bill of ‘your mileage may vary’ perfectly. It goes without saying that this genre relies on repeated tasks, and ReStory is no different. You’ll be cleaning, soldering, and painting the entire time. The saving grace for it is the fairly nice selection of electronics you can unlock as you progress and make more money, making it easy to avoid the tech you dislike tinkering with and focus on those that you enjoy.
The addition of the airbrush and stickers also allows for customization, and while I’m not the most artistic while using a mouse, it was a lot of fun drawing little designs on console cases. One of the goofier inclusions is the ‘upgrade’ disks.
Occasionally a customer will arrive with a phone or the like, and you’ll be tasked with hopping on your PC and banging out code like you’ve just been told to ‘hack the planet.’ It is so silly to just keyboard smash your way through a mini-game like this, but having lived through the era of hacking movies where the typing is erratic and the screen is filled with constantly scrolling green text, I have to admit that I had fun with it. For those who want a bit of a challenge in their cozy fix-it game, there is a set of ‘speed’ challenges that are introduced, where you have to fully rebuild an item as fast as possible.
One mistake in the part order and you’ll have to start the build over, but the clock doesn’t stop until you actually finish. This one was probably my least favorite thing to do. Putting a button in before a joystick can set you back in your time, and as I didn’t spend a lot of time looking at the assembly order notebook, I found it a little frustrating at times. However, outside the few times it’s required to progress, you can freely choose to race the clock or be like me and avoid that tab altogether.
It’s also likely that you’ll beat the storyline before you own all the certifications. I rolled the credits at around 15 hours, but there is no need to worry over it, as the end of the game sees you picking up your soldering iron again in a sort of ‘free-play’ mode where you can keep taking repair requests.
As glowing as my review has been, there are a few things worth noting on the accessibility front that might have made my experience even better. There is a ton of clicking and holding, especially towards the beginning with the lower-quality screwdrivers. It’s somewhat expected of the genre to have this as a mechanic, but it’s still exhausting on the hands. The second is a more glaring issue, and that’s the visibility of the screws and the highlight colors not being changeable.
Once you get to a new ‘layer’ of a device, the screws will flash yellow to show you where they are, and while that’s incredibly helpful, it doesn’t stick around. Once you take a screw out, their spots are highlighted in white, and it changes slightly depending on whether the screw has been replaced or not.
There were times when it was very hard for me to tell if I had already replaced a screw or not, and when I went to see if I could change the highlight color to something a bit more visible for me, I found no options. These problems aside, I still thoroughly enjoyed my time with it, and the slight frustration of having to squint at my monitor or do mid-build hand stretches wasn’t enough to sour the experience.
Over the years, I have found it a little difficult to explain why I love tech repair. It’s obviously useful, but for me it’s always been this meditative experience where I can still freely be a gremlin who loves to ‘scavenge’ useful little items; and ReStory managed to sort of rekindle that energy in me in a way few other games have. This game truly feels like a love-letter to a more tactile tech era, where you can relive (or experience for the first time) the joy of cracking open an electronic and bringing it back to life.
