Konbini Shift

⚠️ Photosensitivity Warning ⚠️

This game contains flashing lights, high-contrast strobing, and rapidly changing visual patterns that may cause seizures in people with photosensitive epilepsy. The same warning is shown in-game before play begins.

Konbini Shift is an arcade puzzler about working the register at a Tokyo convenience store overnight. Orders stack up on the counter. Each one names a snack and an exact number. You have a shelf full of stock and never enough time.

An order wants three onigiri. Find three sitting in a line, drag across them, let go. Sideways serves a row, up or down serves a column, and picking the wrong one is how everybody's first shift goes.

The shelf slides on a timer and pushes your stock out of place, so the line you lined up may be gone by the time you reach it. A drag that completes no order counts against you, and too many in one shift costs you the points you have been saving. The limit tightens every clean shift you string together.

VIP orders pay double and run out of patience fast, and cannot be changed. Leave one waiting and the floor goes to PANIC.

Yen buys deeper into the break room tree, where your abilities come from: throw a tile away, cut an order down, nudge a snack into place, sweeten what a customer pays. You spend points on them mid-shift and each needs a cooldown moment to come back, so you cannot lean on one all night.

Then you choose. Go home and bank it, or clock into OVERTIME, where the clocks tighten and the payout grows with them. Push too far and you lose the lot, and your job! The next NEW HIRE starts fresh with no powerups.

Sato, your shift manager, sets a goal every night. Clear it and he hands over something new for the kitchen, a stack or a machine. What you cook goes on the stock room table, and what is on that table is what customers ask for on the next shift run.

The back room runs a different rule: two of the same thing merge into one better thing. Stacks hand you ingredients, a cutting board turns rice and nori into onigiri, and the slow machines take a shift or two to finish what you load in. Food left out goes off, and the fridge is never big enough.

The kitchen floor starts buried under boxes. Open one, work out what is in it, and make something of it. Clear the whole floor, every box gone, every machine empty, nothing left lying out, and you have finished the game, and SATO promotes you to manager and reveals the real reason he has been saving up for!

What is in the kitchen

• 119 snacks and dishes, every one with a price on it

• 90 of them you cook yourself. The simplest needs one ingredient, the biggest needs nine

• 80 ingredients to cook with

• 20 kinds of food: onigiri, maki, nigiri, gunkan, teishoku, sandwiches, cake, mochi, daifuku, dango, wagashi, kanmi, popsicles, jam, cheese, coffee, tea, milk, fruit and vegetables

• 7 machines that take real time to finish, and 18 bowls, trays and plates to serve on

• 25 stacks that hand you ingredients, 55 different ones between them

• 60 dishes Sato asks you to make, and 29 stacks and machines he gives you to do it

• 10 powerups, each on its own cooldown

• 10 shifts, and 15,000 yen in the till to start

• 3 of Sato's 60 dishes. The first one he wants is onigiri

• 4 of the 29 stacks and machines: rice, nori, a crate and a cutting board

• 6 of the 10 powerups. The four seismic ones are held back for the full game

• The whole shop floor, nightly goals, the stock room, OVERTIME, and a record to beat

The full game lands in November: fifty seven more dishes, nineteen more stacks, six more machines, the seismic powers, Steam Achievements and Leaderboards, and the rest of the kitchen floor.