There’s an electronics shop in Nagoya-chū Denkiyasan. Dusty shelves, dead monitors, a counter scarred by decades of small transactions. You wake up on its floor with no name and no memory of how you got there.
The shop isn’t in Nagoya. At least, its original inspiration isn’t. It’s in Turin, and I’ve been inside it a thousand times.
My father ran a shop, a lovely place with art and vintage objects all around. He was also a painter, and loved good art. He occasionally also sold his own art in there, together with thousands of objects made of beauty, time and memories. The map you walk through in this first part of the game is that small shop, drawn from memory. Same rooms, same layout, same way the light came in. I just moved it to Japan and let it rot for forty or so more years.
That’s the whole project, in a way. Real places, dressed up as somewhere you’ve never been. Real “stuff” that was loved and played once, and then forgotten about, until a memory wakes them up again.
Why a text adventure, in 2026
I grew up on DOS commands and some Infocom-style parser games. You type, the world answers. No graphics doing the work for you, just words and your own head filling in the rest.
It’s a strange form to choose now. Text adventures still have a small, dedicated community. But I wanted a game about memory, and the text adventure is already a game about memory. You hold the map in your head. You remember which door you haven’t opened. The form is the theme. I couldn’t find a better fit, so I stopped looking.
The folklore is real (mostly)
The monster in this first act is a tsukumogami. In Japanese folklore, an object used long enough wakes up. A tool, a robe, a teapot. After roughly a hundred years, an ordinary thing stops being ordinary and grows a spirit of its own.
In this game, I’ve made care and neglect part of what gives those spirits their character. Some objects remember being loved; others remember being left behind.
So the first yokai you meet is a CRT monitor that’s been sitting on a shelf, watching the door, for longer than anyone remembers. You can’t force it. You have to do something first, something that shows that it mattered once. That’s not a puzzle I bolted on. That’s the whole idea of the thing.
There are other yokai later on, but the other three chapters are works in progress. One more original yokai and one I invented, a deliberate addition to the folklore that inspired the game.
Act two will be about identity and memory, with a fitting yokai that you need to face. Act Three comes from a dream I’ve had for years. An underground passage, the kind that links a street to a train platform, packed with cramped little shops selling things nobody needs. I’m always looking for the retro game stores. I never quite find them. The corridor keeps going. I’ve decided not to fight that dream. I’m building it instead.
What it actually is right now
Act One is live and free. It’s part one of four, and it’s an early build, so some of it is rough and some of it will change based on what people tell me.
I built it solo, with an AI coding assistant doing the heavy lifting on the engine while I wrote the world. There’s something fitting about using a brand new machine to bring a shop full of dead ones back to life.
The hardware in the shop draws on real machines: a Sharp X68000, an FM Towns and a Famicom. Their history sits beside things I’ve invented. If you lived any part of that era, you’ll recognise the shelf. Go on and try to use them. There’s also a clock that shows a year that hasn’t happened, and a file that asks a question I’m not going to spoil. The shop knows your name. You don’t.
Play it
Act One takes only a few minutes, but you can explore around more. It runs in your browser, no download.
Play Nagoya-chū Denkiyasan on itch.io →
If you play it, tell me what worked and what didn’t. Especially if you love text adventures, old Japanese computers, strange folklore, or quiet horror. Silence is the only feedback I can’t use.
You can reach me at hello@retroaffaire.com, or just leave a comment on the itch page.
Ah, I know that the title sounds a bit off with that “chu” character. But hey, it’s on purpose. Everything needs to feel a bit… off.
Stay curious. Stay nostalgic.
Because retro never dies, it just respawns.
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