Discounty Review | Clean Up on Aisle Six!
I’ve never worked at a grocery store but due to the amount of grocery store simulator games that I’ve played, I’m pretty sure I’d be an expert at it instantly.
Discounty from developer Crinkle Cut Games is a life and grocery store sim that follows a story many of us are familiar with - the main character moves to a small town to help their family with their grocery store. The store has seen better days and really needs some help to get things running smoothly again. While your Aunt doesn’t seem super thankful that you’re there to help, hopefully her and the town will be a bit happier once the store gets a fresh coat of paint.
In the game, you wake up a few hours before your store opens so you can wander about the town and get to know the people that live there. Many of them feel apprehensive about the changes that you hope to make to the grocery store. The town of Blomkest seems resistant to change and they’re happy with their status quo. Unfortunately, your Aunt doesn’t care what the town thinks and pushes you to get things started very quickly.
Once the store opens you’ll be in charge of checking out customers, keeping the shelves stocked and keeping the store clean. In the beginning you’ll start with just a few products to keep track of and customers shoppings lists will be pretty short because of it. As you level up your store, you’ll unlock more products that you can order and you can upgrade your shelves and fridges to hold more stock, make items more enticing to customers, and more. You can also buy promotional signs or merchandise to make stock even MORE appealing.
You can also get new products for the store from vendors in town, but this is a bit more complicated. There’s a bit of a monopoly in Blomkest so oftentimes you have to get approval from certain people or complete quests for them in order to be able to stock their products. The fisherman, for example, is controlled by the company that makes frozen fish sticks and they have a disgusting new product that they want you to sell before they’ll approve you stocking the fisherman’s fish in your store. It’s a fun way to make it so that you don’t just get all of your products from one place.
The mini-game that you play when checking out customers was one of my favorite parts of the game. In the beginning, you have to key in the price and amount of each item the customer is purchasing before scanning it in order to get their correct total. Once you get an upgraded scanner, you’ll have to play a different little mini game when customers check out where you must find the correct side of the product where the barcode is. I found this to be a super fun way to keep things from getting slow and boring while you’re glued to your register.
One major issue I came across with the game was when customers entered my store. At least once a day there would be a customer that would enter the store, pick up a few things on their list and then “Blair Witch” somewhere in the store for the rest of the day (i.e. they would stand somewhere staring at a wall, unmoving, as if possessed by a witch). Sometimes they would eventually snap out of their witchy trance and check out, but they would always be angry and leave the store unhappy. I mean, I’d be unhappy too if every time I went into a grocery store I was possessed, but Discounty doesn’t make it obvious why customers are angry so it was hard for me to correct the issue. Even customers that hadn’t glitched would sometimes leave my store angry despite having checked them out quickly and having everything on their list. It didn’t cause any huge problems, but it was a bit of a silly bug to deal with nearly every day that I opened the store.
When you’re done with your work day, you’ll have some extra time before you need to go to bed. There are quests to complete around town that sometimes have absolutely nothing to do with you or your store, but are fun all the same. The more quests you complete the more you’ll learn about the folks living in Blomkest and the many mysteries hidden there. There’s a mysterious fog, for example, surrounding the area by the farm and factory. There’s a rat problem you might want to deal with. Blomkest may seem cute on the surface, but is there possibly a seedy underbelly? I guess you’ll have to find out.
The biggest issue that I came across when playing the game, apart from the bug mentioned before, was towards the very end when there was a particular request that required you to see ten of an item in one day. It took a couple of WEEKS of in-game time to complete this quest despite how much I was using to boost sales of the product. I had multiple promotional signs, I had vendor posters posted in town - everything I could think of and it still took AGES to complete the quest. I like a good challenge but this one in particular felt very randomized, as if no matter what I did to promote that specific product, success was just up to chance.
Apart from that, Discounty is a fantastic supermarket sim game with a fun little story that has some unexpected sneaky twists. Its characters are silly and charming and the mechanics of the grocery store are well thought-out and fun. Apart from a few little bugs I encountered, I didn’t want the game to end and have since recommended it to lots of my friends. Grab Discounty if you want a nice, cozy game with great heart, fun mechanics and only enough rats to be a little bit concerning.
Breakdown
Name: Discounty
Developer: Crinkle Cut Games
Publisher: PQube
Availability: PC
Game Length: 15-20 hours
Reviewed on Steam Deck
Final Thoughts
I really loved every minute of Discounty. I absolutely couldn’t put it down and was disappointed when it ended. My biggest critique was that it had a lot of potential to have more content and the ability to make your store even larger. But in this regard it’s quality over quantity and what is available is super fun and unique. Discounty is one to write home about for sure, especially after those little bugs I mentioned get patched out.