The Convenience Store | 夜勤事件 is a J-horror game about a college girl on a night shift.
You take on the role of a college girl working the late-night shift at a local convenience store. The gameplay primarily involves carrying out mundane retail tasks such as restocking shelves, disposing of expired products, and serving the occasional customer. However, over the course of your shifts, strange and unsettling events begin to unfold, creating a growing sense of dread and unease.
The game's use of a retro VHS-style aesthetic, with its grainy visuals, screen distortions, and analog audio effects, helps to transport you to the rural Japanese setting. Navigating the dimly-lit convenience store and the surrounding neighborhood at night heightens your sense of isolation and vulnerability.
Each gameplay session involves repeating a fairly consistent routine across multiple in-game nights. You must wake up, make your way to the convenience store, and carry out your shift-work duties. This repetition serves to lull you into a sense of complacency, making the occasional strange occurrences all the more jarring and unsettling when they occur.
While the core gameplay loop is fairly straightforward, the game does provide opportunities for deeper exploration and investigation. You can examine the convenience store's CCTV footage, search for hidden clues, and piece together the underlying mystery at your own pace. This encourages you to carefully observe your surroundings and actively engage with the game's unsettling narrative.
The game features a handful of light puzzle-solving elements, such as the 'TV puzzle' mentioned in several reviews. These puzzles are generally not overly complex, but they do require you to think critically and make use of the information and items you've gathered throughout the game.
One common criticism is the slow pace of movement, which can make traversing the game's environments feel tedious at times. Additionally, the lack of a save feature means you must complete the game in a single sitting, which may not appeal to all players. However, the game's short runtime of around 40-60 minutes helps to mitigate this limitation.
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