ReStory beginner guide — starting your Y2K repair shop right

What ReStory is and where it stands

ReStory: Chill Electronics Repairs is a narrative-driven shop management sim from developer Mandragora (the studio behind I Am Future) and publisher tinyBuild. You run a small electronics repair shop in mid-2000s Tokyo, restoring Y2K-era gadgets — cell phones, handhelds, digital pets, cameras, music players, home appliances, and game consoles including officially licensed Atari systems — while customer stories branch based on the choices you make.

Current status, checked on July 26, 2026:

• Release date: August 6, 2026, listed on the Steam page and confirmed in press coverage of tinyBuild’s July 23 announcement.
• Platform: PC (Windows) via Steam, single-player only.
• Price: not yet listed on the store page — not yet verified.
• Demo: available since June 15, 2026, rated “Overwhelmingly Positive” (96% of 1,085 reviews) when we checked.

Everything below separates what the official store page states from what press hands-on time with the demo observed. Demo behavior can still change at launch.

The confirmed core loop

The official Steam description lays out the loop directly. You greet customers and take their devices in for repair. Each repair means you “carefully take each gadget apart, clean it, replace faulty parts, and assemble it back together.” Between jobs you manage the shop’s finances and use a Y2K-style in-game web browser to hunt for spare parts, with both in-person and online orders.

The narrative side is not decoration: the store page describes customers whose stories branch into multiple endings depending on your choices — for example, deciding whether to report “a disturbing find inside the former gangster’s phone.” If you care about story outcomes, expect your dialogue decisions to matter from early on.

For a closer breakdown of the repair steps themselves, see the repair workflow guide.

Best preparation right now: play the demo

Since the game is not out yet, the demo is the only firsthand ground truth available. A few useful facts about it:

• It launched June 15, 2026 and was part of Steam Next Fest June 2026.
• Shacknews’ hands-on describes starting with very little: “a screwdriver, a brush, a barely-working computer, and shelf space.”
• The demo ends after repairing a PSP-style handheld, which the previewer found nearly 1:1 with the real hardware.

The same preview describes a real learning curve: early repairs lean on in-game cheat sheets and instructions, and over time you need them “less and less.” That suggests time in the demo transfers directly to the full game.

First-session priorities (demo-based, may change at launch)

These come from press hands-on reports of the demo, not from the released game, so treat them as starting hypotheses rather than tested strategy:

1. Slow down on disassembly. The preview describes removing tiny screws “one by one” — rushing is how devices and repair order get confused.
2. Pay attention to reassembly order. Putting a device back together in the correct order after cleaning is explicitly part of the challenge described.
3. Respect the rent. In the demo, the shop space costs 2,000 yen weekly, paid to a landlord. Launch-version costs are not yet verified, but budgeting for fixed costs from day one is clearly part of the design. The profit and tools guide tracks what money does in more detail.
4. Talk to everyone. Locals in the demo include a mail carrier, repeat customers, a cop and the landlord — and the branching story runs through these conversations.

What is deliberately not listed here

The following are not published anywhere official yet, so we do not list them: launch price, campaign length, the full device roster, the number of endings, exact repair payouts, and any “best build” or optimal progression route. Anything you see elsewhere claiming those specifics before August 6, 2026 is speculation. This page will be rechecked against the release version.