You've inherited a shop that doesn't open for the living. Every dusk the shutter lifts on a different customer — and the till only takes what they're willing to give up.
The shop sits at the crooked end of a backstreet that only shows up on half the maps of town. By day it's a shuttered storefront nobody looks at twice. By night, the lantern lights itself.
You didn't apply for this job — you inherited it, along with a ledger written in a hand that isn't yours, a cash register that refuses coins, and a resident spirit named Kokkuri-san who has strong opinions about inventory placement.
Customers arrive after the last train and before the first light: a fox missing its third tail, a schoolgirl who graduated forty years ago, a salaryman still waiting for a train that already left. None of them carry yen. What they carry instead — a pressed flower, a half-kept promise, the last hour of someone's afternoon — is the real currency of the shop.
Your job isn't to question what they've brought. It's to figure out what they actually came for, and whether the shop is willing to give it to them.
These systems are in active design and development. Numbers, names, and art are all subject to change before the demo.
Every spirit customer wants something they won't say out loud. Place a hand on the counter board and let Kokkuri-san drift the planchette toward the truth — a short, tactile minigame that reveals the real request hiding behind the small talk.
The register runs on candle wax, moon-dust, folded paper cranes, and stranger things. Some offerings are handed over at the counter; others have to be gathered by wandering the town after hours, when the streets change shape.
Where you stock a ward, a bottle, or an ofuda charm changes how a room feels to the customer standing in it. Arrange the shop map-tile by map-tile — the right shelf can calm a restless spirit before you've said a word.
The shop's calendar follows the old festivals — Obon, Setsubun, the long Hyakki Yagyō night — each bringing limited-time visitors and requests that only make sense on that one date of the year.
Each spirit who visits the shop remembers you between sessions. Serve them well and the shop's reach into town grows; turn them away and word travels the other direction too.
Kokkuri Shop is built in RPG Maker with a hand-drawn pixel tileset. Here's the current state of things.
Open shop, greet customer, divine request, trade offering, close shutter.
Shop interior and first backstreet tile pass complete.
Planchette-drift prototype in testing.
Targeting a short vertical-slice demo next.