Discounty Review – Review – Nintendo World Report

There’s something appealing about working an unappealing job, just in a video game. Right when I got out of college I worked at a big box store for a few months while looking for a more permanent job, and it’s an experience I don’t particularly want to revisit in real life. But in a video game? I could spend hours working the most menial job if it’s gamified. Working in a supermarket in real life isn’t my idea of fun, but such an experience as represented in Discounty ends up being very fun.

Discounty is a shop management game where you move into town as an employee of the supermarket, now a franchise of a larger chain. Throughout the game you need to run and manage the supermarket by stocking shelves, selling items, buying new items, and organizing all of this as you see fit. As the game progresses you begin to unlock more items, expand the store, and need to find ways to keep everything organized and running. This includes negotiating for new items and trade deals with local merchants, who have items you can’t get while normally stocking the store. While you run the store each day, you also meet townspeople who have their own quests to follow as the town slowly starts to change as a result of the Discounty chain moving into town.

The day to day gameplay of Discounty is really fun and a treat to play, with each expansion to the store feeling both rewarding and challenging as you have to manage several aspects (stocking the store, making sure it’s clean, checking people out) at once. There’s also a fair amount of customization, as you can move shelves around, buy new shelves, and lay your supermarket out the way you want it. While there aren’t gameplay benefits to making your store particularly pretty or even to organizing your storage space, I found myself spending a lot of time focusing on how to make this the store of my dreams, even if there are no rewards for having a visually interesting store.

The game also looks and plays great. The visuals and music are unique and charming, and I found the controls to be usually pretty intuitive. I had a bit of frustration early on figuring out the cash register (to press a button, you have to hold the control stick in the direction of a button and then press A, which lead to more misclicks than I’d like) but for the most part it’s easy to understand how you need to do something. I did notice a few glitches, including one crash, but the game ran very well for the most part.

The piece I feel most torn about is the town and the story as a whole. A big part of the reason I was excited to try Discounty after seeing the trailer in a Wholesome Direct was the potential social commentary, where you represent a large corporation moving into a small town, seeking infinite growth. While that is there, Discounty just doesn’t ever go quite far enough. Part of that might be the game’s length – I was surprised when Discounty ended after three in-game chapters or about 40 in game days. But I wished we’d get just a bit more social commentary, and what we did get feels muddled. Part of that might be the problem of playing as a video game protagonist, where you’re solving all the town’s problems while also representing its ills. But I do think the developers could have gone a bit deeper on this crumbling small town, the environmental impacts, and made the gameplay fit in with this. Perhaps more choices would be nice? I just wish the overall concept would have been taken a bit further.

Through all that, I had also hoped there was a bit more to do in the town itself. Each Sunday you have a day off, which I usually ended up spending tying up loose ends if I had a quest available. If not, it felt like a long time to spend without much to do. I often ended up reorganizing the store, but I think if there could be more quests, more ways to get involved in the town, that the weekly day off could feel like a reward rather than a chore. Partway through you can hire an employee, who always spends his days off at the store because there’s no other fun place to be. I found myself relating to that all too well.

At its core, Discounty is a fun experience. The gameplay loop of running a supermarket is satisfying, and I enjoyed my time quite a bit. My hesitation is that I think it’s about halfway there between being a fun indie shop sim and being an indie game with a message, and I wish they could have pushed their narrative just a bit further to be more memorable. Discounty is still worth playing, but it makes me want to see what the developers can do next. While the ideas and the gameplay are there, there’s some untapped potential as well.