Reviewed on PC

There’s something oddly comforting about capsule toys. With the prevalent trends of blindboxes, surprise pulls on gacha games, and the collectible culture dominating physical stores and online feeds, the thrill of not knowing what you’ll get has become part of the fun.

In Gacha Capsule Shop Simulator – Akihabara Demo, this game endlessly immerses you into that feeling without having to spend any money at all. It translates that small tactile joy of turning a gacha machine into a laid-back management experience.

A Slice-of-Life in Akihabara

As you begin the game, you familiarize yourself with your new gacha capsule shop in the buzzing electric town of Akihabara. With its bare bones and all, you can name your shop, and you’re guided by a small window on the upper right of your screen on the tasks you’re supposed to do to kickstart your business.

You start by ordering a few gacha capsule lines, additional machines, renovating your shop’s interior, and even increasing brand awareness through ads and events via your phone. After stocking your machines, you can open up shop and wait for customers to come in.

Pulling for a new experience

At its core, the gameplay is straightforward: you manage your capsule shop by stocking machines, maintaining the machines with a screwdriver (or hilariously whacking it with a bamboo stick), serving customers who want their bills exchanged, checking out their purchased figurines, and more.

Sometimes you even have to pull out a bat to whack away the yakuza coming into your store. Other times, it’s a sumo wrestler who stomps right in and breaks all your machines.

The loop in this game is pretty easy to pick up. However, you can also decide to make some gacha capsule pulls yourself. You might even get lucky and get very rare items that can sell for whopping prices, which can give some additional profit in your day-to-day operations.

This taps into the same satisfaction as opening gacha capsules and blind boxes in real life. Even if it’s limited in this demo, you’ll be thrilled over the satisfaction of the goofy figures you might get, with some inspired by some internet memes. Its gameplay may be rooted in a management sim, but its uniqueness comes from its concept of running gacha shops in Japan.

Designed for Collectors at Heart

Mainly, the biggest strength of this game is the variety of its figurines. While they do take inspiration from real-life series such as Gundam (for the Aegis 3000 capsules in-game), the designs give some familiar silhouettes and themes without relying too much on direct references. There are even original designs that I believe are unique, such as the Chibishibe, Feather Frenzy, and Banana Bunch series.

I also enjoy the challenge of having to grind levels to unlock new figurines, items, and features to add to the shop. Mainly for the first 10 levels or so, you’d have to manage your shop on your own, juggling all the roles. But it becomes worth it over time as you progress and unlock new content. Though it’s still limited, as the demo only allows you to reach level four.

Besides that, I like how you can stack gacha capsule products with each other when you purchase new supplies. That’s one experience I’ve appreciated with this game. It helps avoid having too many boxes in your storage room, especially in the early game.

Where the Machine Needs Rerolling

In terms of the improvements that can be made to this game, I mainly struggled with the checkout counter. As you click to use it, you, as the player, stay within a fixed space, and the camera view is quite limited, not allowing you to move around to zoom in on the cash register numbers to press to give the exchanged bills, coins, and change for customers. Similarly, the shop’s roster of interior items to design it could be further improved and given more variety for the lower levels.

Additionally, picking up the bat to scare away the yakuza or using the bamboo stick to fix your gacha machines is quite a hassle as well. You’d have to pick them up in the storage room, and when you drop those items, they automatically return to the storage room instead of dropping them on the floor.

I’d very much like to have the same user experience for those weapons and tools, like with the boxes wherein you can pick them up and drop them anywhere, or even the screwdriver that has a designated key to press to enable or disable it.

Aside from those improvements, I noticed a bug wherein as you fill the gacha capsule machines, one or a few of them stay open, and you can’t seem to “close” them despite finishing the refill, repairing the machine, etc. It isn’t much of a big deal, but it does make you think if customers could steal your capsules without paying.

Promising, Even in Limited Supply

With that said, this game is still a demo, and you can feel its limits. The systems introduced are clearly a foundation rather than a complete experience, and there’s only so much depth you can reach before hitting the demo’s cap. The game already shows a strong sense of direction. And after checking other preview screenshots from the game’s developers, I’m excited for the full experience of what Gacha Capsule Shop Simulator – Akihabara Demohas to offer.

If the full release expands more on its shop customization and smooths out some of its interactions, this could easily become a go-to cozy sim for collectors and casual sim fans alike. Even in its current demo form, it’s an enjoyable time sink that delivers the joy of gacha without the guilt of spending real money.