Discounty Review

Discounty is a cosy Supermarket simulator in the vein of Stardew Valley. You’ll be ordering products, stocking shelves, and then selling them to the various townsfolk of Blomkest in an effort to expand your business. Unfortunately along with that comes dealing with inattentive local government, shady local businesses, and backstabbing journalists as it seems something in this town is rotten. And all you wanted to do was run a supermarket.

You arrive in the town of Blomkest to take over and reinvigorate your Aunt’s business, the local Discounty supermarket, where “everything’s always on sale!” As you wander through the town, you stroll past the bank, town hall, a bar, all the usual places you might expect, but there’s also abandoned buildings dotted around and a memorial museum that is no longer maintained since the council cut funding. Then you’re shown to the trailer where you live for the whole game – no house upgrades here – and told to ignore the mysterious shed behind it that emanates strange noises.

As you get stuck into managing the supermarket, you’ll be ordering stuff, putting it on display, and then manning the cash registers. You don’t set the prices yourself, instead hammering them into a calculator based on the price in your big book of products. It’s pretty enjoyable at first. There’s a zen-like calmness to it when you don’t have too many customers, but when you do, you to have to rush around refilling shelves whilst also serving them and cleaning the floor, which is hectic and results in frustrated customers. I quickly decided to have multiple shelves with the same item at a time so I didn’t have to rush around so much. With a bit of mental maths, you can speed up manning the till as well, saving yourself from the angry faces from impatient customers.

But there’s a litany of things that get in the way of this. Most products are bought form a computer and then quickly delivered by a guy called Guy, which is perfect. You do also need to arrange trade deals with local businesses for access to their products, though, which means running around town every time you want to restock their products, upgrade the trade deal, or ask them something. Stocking your shelves limits you to grabbing things from the store room in groups of five. Only need to display two toilet rolls? For some reason have to pick up five and put three back, adding unnecessary time and fiddliness.

As customers shuffle around once you open at 9AM, they leave scuff marks on the floor, but you can only clean two scuffs at a time with soap before needing to take the bucket back. Then one of the customers who got everything they were shopping for and, if anything, you managed to serve quicker than the others leaves with an angry face for no discernible reason – nothing you can do about that. At the end of the day, 5PM, you close the shop and sit through the unskippable summary of sales, which is doubly redundant as you need to manually keep track of stock, and because you served everyone yourself. The only information I really need on this page is how much money I made and it doesn’t need to be listed per product, one at a time, whilst I wait for it to finish.

The shop doesn’t open on Sunday, so you might as well skip the day and get through to Monday, where you’ll have to replace all the posters around town, because they’re removed every weekend for no good reason. Oh, but you’ve probably forgotten to print them and the only printer in town, which is in the town hall, takes eight in-game hours to print a single one.

I quickly lost my enjoyment of Discounty because of all these elements. Management games can be cosy, but not when constantly putting frustrations in my path. I was enjoying completing small challenges to unlock more products, add more pockets to my outfit, get an improved scanner, and the actual act of selling was fun, but restocking while serving customers is next to impossible when there’s a lot of customers without angering them all. Every time one of the issues above shows itself again – which is pretty much every day for some of them – my enjoyment diminishes.

The overarching storyline seemed like it might be a plus at first as well, but something isn’t quite right. Sometimes plot threads are just left unresolved. You start out in a trailer and that seems like a signal for “you’ll be able to upgrade to a house at some point,” and the abandoned house you find shortly afterwards reinforces this, but in the end it just doesn’t happen. Then there’s the townsfolk, who are the most infuriating and obnoxious group of NPCs I’ve ever encountered. Everyone is gossiping, myself included, but one character admonished me for apparently starting a conversation with gossip about her own son – all I did was press to interact! Elmer in the town hall has be constantly hounded to do things he’s supposed to, such as removing a tree that is cutting off the only access to nearby farms, or fixing a broken staircase.

All of this involves sprinting across Blomkest on top of your other outings to restock your trade deal products that only restock on specific days. It’s infuriating. I just wanted to run a supermarket, not deal with red tape, incompetent government officials, unpleasant people, and getting loans. Even your Aunt in the game says “I didn’t catch you slacking, did I?” as she enters the store you moved into town to revitalise for her. Everyone just seems so unpleasant, and the “small town drama” promised by the game’s marketing just means whe the worst person you know would describe as “spilling tea”, as they spread rumours and bad mouth people behind their backs.

Performance-wise, I’ve been playing on a Switch, and my experience hasn’t been great. There’s no crashing or anything, but anytime you’re outside of a small building the frame rate tanks noticeably. It’s a very nice looking game as far as pixel art goes, with plenty of nice looking visual effects depending on what time of day it is, but the frame rate is consistently terrible when outside. There’s also some small oversights in behaviours, such as once when a staircase was blocked off for way longer than it was supposed to, but I saw Barbara, my fishy sticks supplier and uses the stairs in her commute, walk straight through it without so much as a pause.