inKONBINI: One Store. Many Stories

InKonbini succeeds in fulfilling its promise to serve as a place of fragmented encounters—of universal shards of humanity—even if the setting feels distant and elusive in time and space to a Western millennial such as myself. Regardless, it manages to leave you with something. Where it fails, however, is in embodying another identity that was easy to associate with it—even just by reading its premise and knowing the frenetic, sometimes hellish, routine of Japanese convenience stores: our need (unhealthy, perhaps?) to always have something to do, to measure our progress, and to find meaning within the routine. The game lasts 5–6 hours; it takes care to tell a tender coming-of-age story, and then it ends. The fact is that, in doing so, if you don't resonate with the events it depicts, then InKonbini—a game with a very strong sensibility, yet built on rather thin foundations—has very little to offer you.