Convenience Store

Overview

Convenience stores usually serve as mundane decoration in games, rather than being locations for the player to visit. Like apartment buildings and warehouses, their presence helps make a modern-day setting feel "right."

But in certain games, a mundane location is just what the developers want. As part of its attempts to capture Japanese urban life, the Yakuza series has painstakingly reproduced Japan's distinctive konbini, from the copy machines near the entrance down to the placement of the onigiri section. Other games use everyday settings to increase the impact of weird or horrifying events – though a castle or an old mine might be inherently creepier, the zombie-infested convenience stores of Resident Evil 2 and The Walking Dead can be just as disturbing because they're closer to home.