Oboro no Ichi: a market for lost souls, lit by lanterns

Oboro no Ichi lives by lantern light, and that is the game's best decision.

The market you build only exists under the glow of lanterns, between tiled roofs and bamboo, and every new stall adds a warm spot in the dark. After an hour, you zoom out and just look. It is a game you contemplate as much as you play.

It is a very gentle management game. You connect stalls, buildings and paths, produce resources, supply the stands, sell, and the market becomes appealing enough to welcome new wandering spirits. These lost souls are your customers, and the game treats them with a melancholy that sets the tone for everything else: you are not building a mall, you are building a place where people come to find peace between two memories.

There is no urgency. No looming bankruptcy, no timer. The loop is easy to grasp, and the only difficulty comes from wanting to make things both beautiful and efficient, two goals that keep fighting over the same alley.

Its flaw is its youth. It is an Early Access game made by one person in a year, and you see most of it quite quickly: production still lacks variety, and past the first hours there is less to discover than you would like. The first sixteen players to leave a review were all won over, which says a lot about what kind of game this is: small, sincere, and very polished where it chose to be.

At 10.61 euros, it is for evenings when you want to set down something pretty and think about nothing else.

Show us your night market on the InsertCoins Discord, I have a soft spot for the ones with too many lanterns.