Scent of You

The shop's yours.

The previous owner left half a cup of cold coffee, a lock that hasn't worked in three years, and a note: "If a customer says no, it's no. You'll understand eventually."

Then the bell rings. A bookseller who needs to get through thirty seconds of silence. A retired baker whose wife wore one scent for forty years — he never learnt its name. A cheesemonger with a receipt that says only two words.

None of them can tell you what they want. So you listen — and you blend.

Features

• Perfumery as detective work. The answer is never on the order slip. It's in what slips out — toast, orange peel, "those thirty seconds" — in how they react when you hand them a smelling strip, and in the keepsakes they leave behind. Pin what matters, set aside what doesn't.
  
• Three notes, one memory. Choose from 36 ingredients across ten families and fill the blending bench: first breath, heart, sillage. Pull the lever. Tie on the label. Name the bottle.
  
• Customers can say no. Everyone carries one thing they will never accept. Hand it to them anyway, and they'll put it back on the shelf without a word.
  
• What lingers. The last bottle you made is still in the air when the next customer walks in — and it changes the first thing they say.
  
• No wrong answers. Miss the mark and you get another conversation, not a game over. Nothing is locked away, and nothing is taken back.
  
• Someone remembers you. Keep a drawer for every customer — le tiroir — that fills with what they've told you and what they do when they're not in the shop. By the end, they'll tell you the kind of perfumer you've been.

Who comes through the door

• June — 27, works at the bookshop on Rue Bonnat, hosting her first book club. Talks a lot. I mean—
  
• Otto — a retired baker. Short sentences. Forty years of "my bottle".
  
• Solène — goat's cheese stall at the Saturday market. Sharp, and not about to admit anything.
  
• Clément — works nights. Polite, tired, drifting off mid-sentence.
  
• Leander — the one who left the note. He only came back for his cup. Apparently.
  
• …and more regulars: twins, one of them a month from her wedding, a hairdresser on day twenty-one without a cigarette, a cellist on the fourth desk, a PE teacher with an under-10s rugby side.

A small, warm story

A cosy narrative game of about 5–6 hours: 8 customers, 16 visits, two endings. Set in a 1970s-flavoured corner of Europe, drawn in a warm, printed-paper palette, with a quiet piano score and a musical layer of its own for every customer.

Come in. The door's never locked.