Review: Discounty (Nintendo Switch) – Pure Nintendo

Discounty is a cozy management game in which you move to a new town to help your aunt run a little grocery store. A day in the life of Discounty is quite busy: design the layout of your store, buy and sell products, clean up after your customers who litter, explore the town, build friendships with the townspeople (especially those from whom you buy products), and find ways to upgrade your store.

After arriving in the town of Blomkest, you’re met by your aunt who gives you the basic rundown of her supermarket. This includes buying tables and coolers so you can set out your products, ordering products (which are shipped directly to your store), checking out your customers, keeping track of sales and customer approval, and promoting your products.

Furniture for your store can be purchased at local shops in town. This includes household items like plants, bookshelves, etc., as well as the tables and coolers to store your products and items that help promote your products. For example, buying an aquarium and having it displayed next to any fish items in your store attracts more customers to those items.

You buy bulks of items to sell from a computer in your store. Also on this computer are daily challenges from which you can gain points if completed. You can then use these points to unlock more products. However, you can also unlock products from town locals such as the fisherman, farmer, etc. These are called “trade deals.” You can only trade a certain number of bulks a week, but you can upgrade these deals as you sell more of their items. You can also unlock perks such as reduced costs, more items per bulk, and advertising rights.

You promote your store by hanging up posters around town. You gain access to new posters with better promotions (also from points on your computer) and from trade deals. Posters are printed at the town hall, and they last a week.

Workdays are every day but Sunday, and the workload is pretty simple. Stock your store before it opens, clean up after the customers (they move more slowly when walking in dirt patches), and check them out at a consistent rate. It’s important to keep the store stocked and clean so that customers are able to get in and out quickly enough. To check them out, you start with a calculator, ringing up the items one by one, multiplying their price by however much the customer bought. When you have a lot of customers at once, this can get kind of tricky, but you can upgrade to a scanner through the computer as well. You can also upgrade the shop and expand it as you get further in the game.

While running the shop does take up a lot of the game, there are also other aspects, such as multiple story lines and quests which allow you to explore the town, meet your neighbors, help Blomkest’s environment, and grow its community.

The only problems I had with Discounty were some spelling errors here and there and difficulty with the calculator (though that could have been due to my Joy-Cons and not the game’s interface). I do think this is a game that would work better with a computer mouse/keyboard setup, but it translates well to the Switch’s controls.

It’s also almost impossible to put down, so having it on a mobile console is a great way to keep playing it whenever you want.