ReStory passes 500,000 sales with a free update on the way
Mandragora and tinyBuild's Y2K repair sim ReStory has sold half a million copies, and its first free content update now arrives on 21 September with a new device and a returning cast.
ReStory: Chill Electronics Repairs has sold its way to half a million copies. Developer Mandragora and publisher tinyBuild confirmed the milestone alongside a free content update that now lands on 21 September, a week later than the 14 September slot the studio had pencilled in.
The delay is small and explained: the team needed a little more time to finalise the content, and says it will be "worth the wait". What arrives is a new character, a new device to repair and more story to tie the two together. Fans of the game's first small arc get a payoff, because Kaito and Haruhi return as adults - now an actor and an engineer helping "the big gamedev star who is in the city".
From 300,000 to half a million in five weeks
The sales curve has been steep since launch. ReStory arrived on Steam on 6 August at $19.99 and passed 300,000 copies inside its first week, according to the studio's own update posts. Half a million now makes it one of the more surprising breakout hits of a crowded August, and a serious result for a game about unscrewing, cleaning, soldering and repainting other people's electronics in Y2K-era Japan.
What you actually do in it
ReStory is a repair-shop sim wrapped around a branching story. The devices are the draw: mobile phones, games consoles including licensed Atari systems, handhelds, digital pets, cameras, music players and home appliances, each with its own fault to find. Cleaning a part, replacing a capacitor or ordering the wrong component all feed into the shop's reputation, and the customers bring the plot with them.
Our opinion
Five hundred thousand sales for a soldering sim is the most interesting numbers story of the summer, because it says something awkward for big-budget publishing: people will happily pay for tactile, low-stakes work when the fiction around it is warm enough. Mandragora has also done the unglamorous part properly, shipping a run of patches from 1.0.009r through to 1.0.013r that added save slots and fixed memory leaks instead of publishing a roadmap and going quiet.
The wrinkle is cadence. A one-week slip is nothing, but the studio has trained its players to expect free story beats, and the gap between this content update and the next one is where that goodwill gets spent. Growing Kaito and Haruhi up is a genuinely charming hook, and it is now on the team to keep feeding it.