Last Store on Earth Demo · published
Hello, Keepers 👋
Today let's talk about money. We'll get to what the game costs when the time comes; today it's about how money works inside the shop, because it's one of the design decisions I'm proudest of and one of the ones that took the most work.
The currency of this world is the óbolo.
When a civilisation falls, money doesn't disappear — it gets replaced by the first thing people agree to count. Óbolos are that. Nobody mints them, nobody backs them, and they're worth exactly what they're worth because the person across the counter accepts them. In a world where almost nothing works any more, a handful of tokens still meaning something is, when you think about it, rather extraordinary.
The name comes from the obol, a low-value Greek coin: six of them made a drachma. Small change. But it's famous for something else. It was the coin placed in the mouth of the dead to pay Charon for the crossing. No obol, no passage — you stayed on the bank, watching. And in Spanish — I'm writing this from Madrid — the word survives with a third meaning, the one people use when they drop a few coins in a collection box: an óbolo is a modest contribution. The little you can give. Small change, the fare for the crossing, and the little you can give — all at once. Nobody sat down and decided money would be called that after the Withering. Someone said it once, half joking, and it stuck. That's usually how names survive.
Here's the rule everything else hangs from: in Last Store on Earth money always physically exists. There's no abstract counter ticking up and down. Every óbolo you've earned is somewhere specific in the world. When a customer pays you, those coins move from their hand to your counter. If they're in the till, they're in the till. If they're on the floor because you dropped the drawer, they're on the floor. That sounds like a small detail. It isn't. It changes the whole feel of a day's work. Money stops being a score and becomes something that takes up space, that gets counted, that can be lost track of.
The direct consequence: you won't find your balance in the corner of the screen. It's the decision I've argued with myself about the most, because it cuts against the habits of the genre. But a permanently visible number turns a shop into a spreadsheet with walls. Without it, knowing how business is going stops being an automatic glance and becomes something you do: you walk over, you look, you count. You run this shop with your hands and your eyes, not by reading a scoreboard.
Which is the point where you start wondering how anyone runs a shop like that without losing their mind. The answer was in the coins all along. There are five values: 1, 5, 50, 100 and 500. And notice they don't share a shape. The 1 is a disc. The 5, a hexagon. The 50, an octagon. The 100, a square with a hole through it. The 500, a diamond. What they're made of, nobody knows. They weigh what they weigh and they sound how they sound, and you make do with that. And there is no ten. It jumps from five straight to fifty. Paying forty means counting out eight fives, and everybody does it without complaining because it has always been that way. That gap strikes me as the best proof that nobody designed this money: it simply ended up like this. That isn't decoration. It's what keeps the missing HUD from being cruel. Because you don't need to read the number: with your hand in the drawer, or at a glance across the counter, the silhouette already tells you the value. The information hasn't left the screen — it's moved into the shape of the objects. Which is where it lived before interfaces existed.
And if money is an object that lives somewhere, that somewhere matters. The till on your counter is the most delicate spot in the shop. It's where the whole day's takings pile up, it's in plain sight, and it's right beside the door that people come through — people who aren't always here to buy. Treating it carelessly is the fastest way to lose a good day. I won't spell out everything that can happen to it here. Let's just say it's unwise to leave it alone for too long.
If money is physical, change is physical too. A customer pays with a 100 for something worth 85, and you hand back 15. A 5 and ten 1s, or whatever you've got loose. Which means you have to keep change: a till full of big denominations and no small coins is a till you can't trade with. You start looking at the little ones differently. And look at the shot above, at the display on the register: it reads CHANGE 3. That's three óbolos I owe the man standing in front of me. Look especially at where that number is. It isn't floating in the corner of your screen — it's on the machine's own display, in the world, where you'd see it if you were standing behind that counter. Because taking away the HUD doesn't mean leaving you blind. It means the information has to live somewhere, and that somewhere is an object somebody built for the job.
This is my favourite part. Somebody, somewhere, casts óbolos out of odd alloys. And every so often one of them lands on your counter, in the hand of someone who may or may not know it. And since nobody knows what a good one is made of, there's no way to analyse a bad one either. Only to look at it. To check them you lay them out on the counter and look at them from above, one by one.
You can do that with everything that goes into the till. You genuinely can. It's slow, it's a nuisance, and while you're turning an óbolo over there are three people waiting. Or you can not do it, and trust. And look at what happens there, because it took me a long time to see it: the silhouettes cut both ways. The hexagon, the octagon, the diamond are what let you work fast without reading numbers. And they're exactly what a forger copies. The shortcut that makes the shop comfortable is the same shortcut that gets you cheated. If one gets past you, it's gone. A fake 5 is five óbolos you don't have. You can't pass it on to somebody else, there's no way to get it back, and there's no notification: nothing pops up, nothing flashes, nobody tells you. You find out when you check your coins, and by then hours may have passed. You may never find out who handed it to you.
With that in place, pricing stops being filling in a field. You order stock from Garcés over the radio — 87.4 FM, if you haven't tuned in yet — it arrives in crates, you stock the shelf, and you decide what it's worth. You set the figure and the tag on the shelf gets written with it: what the stock cost you, how far you reckon they'll stretch, and the price you've settled on.
And yes: in that screenshot I'm selling gas masks for less than they cost me. Eleven óbolos down per unit, quite happily, with the tag right there in front of me saying so. I haven't retaken the shot on purpose, because that's exactly what happens when you price by eye. The shop doesn't warn you about that either. Then somebody walks in, reads the tag, and decides whether it seems fair. That's where you find out whether you calculated or you dreamed: price it too high and they'll object and leave. Sometimes rightly. There's a moment on the first visit to the shop that sums the whole game up better than anything I could write. Vera walks in, looks around, and says to Isaac:
"Isaac. It has prices. This place has prices."
A place having prices means there are rules. That somebody bothered. That this isn't a scavenge — it's a shop.
We're a month out from Steam Next Fest, running 19–26 October, where you'll be able to play the demo. I'll be posting here every week until then.
If you want to weigh in on any of this — and I'm genuinely curious what you make of the no-HUD decision — the Discord is open and I read everything.
Thanks for being here this early.
— King Island Studio