I step outside my restaurant, flip the signboard to “open” and pull out my charumera horn to play a tune that echoes throughout the neighborhood — the best fake ramen shop in the world is open for business.
“Japanese Ramen Simulator,” a game developed by Tokyo-based indie studio Wild Dog and launching for ¥1,900 on Oct. 9, does what it says on the tin: You step into the shoes of a chef-owner of a ramen shop. You stock your shop with an increasingly diverse array of ingredients, hire staff, serve customers and gradually expand your business from a single counter to a multistory restaurant.
To those unfamiliar with the simulation genre, where real-world activities are painstakingly rendered into virtual entertainment, watching even 30 seconds of “Japanese Ramen Simulator” will seem ridiculous. You start the day preparing for service based on predetermined recipes — placing orders for ingredients on a laptop at the back of the shop (the ingredients arrive immediately by drone), organizing your kitchen or doing some renovation by adding seats, removing decorations, etc. — and then you open the shop. Customers enter, you take their orders, you make their ramen with variations of toppings and side orders like gyōza (dumplings), chāshū-don (pork rice bowls) and more. And then at 10 p.m., you close up.
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