I have a weirdly specific history with the world of retail food service. My grandfather was the manager of a popular grocery store in my small hometown in rural Illinois, and everyone knew him as a result. If you’ve ever lived in a little, Midwestern town, you know the vibe already. Everyone knows everyone, for better or worse.
Flash forward a collection of decades later, and I myself followed in some of his footsteps as the manager of a cafeteria. Here, I was responsible for ordering products, stocking shelves, advertising, filling in as a cashier, doing inventory, building relationships with vendors, and a handful of other tedious but important tasks to keep the operation going.
In these ways, Discounty is acozyindiemanagement-style game that I fell quickly into a familiar headspace with. Here, my character in a tiny, close-knit town was also tasked with many of the same things that my grandpa and I managed on a daily basis for years.
It was nice to get back into my former element and put the skillset of a past life before getting into games journalism to good use. It’s funny the things you learn throughout life that come in handy later on. I may have never used Calculus in the real world, but various random retail management traits? Yeah, this was my time to shine, baby.
Discounty instantly felt cozy and nostalgic for me, and also induced some mild levels of retail-related PTSD as my customers would complain about out of stock product, wait times, or my hours of operation. Ultimately, this all combined into a nice little indie that I enjoyed a lot, but that isn’t without a few flaws, either. Let’s break it all down like a stack of cardboard stock boxes.
The Classic, Cozy, Smalltown Setup
If you’ve played almost any indie game with a menial job labor system as its backbone in recent years, Discounty follows a lot of the same trends. After a quick character creation screen, you show up at a bus stop in the small town of Blomkest ready to start your new life away from the typical hustle and bustle.
Your Aunt Tellar runs a grocery store in town called Discounty, and you’ve shown up to take over the reins from her in order to keep the place running and develop it into a pivotal mainstay in the little community. A lot of your time in-game is spent talking to the locals, who all have some snippets of gossip about your neighbors to share along the way.
Nothing here is revolutionary from a narrative perspective, but there are plenty of cute little moments throughout that will begin to endear the game to you. I had to take down a rival lemonade stand that setup shop outside my doors. I helped a farmer cope with his messy divorce. I kept a local fisherman’s boat clean while he took a personal break for mental health.
Despite all your efforts to be a good neighbor, you’ll also have to deal with the ultimate overarching story about corporate overreach and the damage that multiple people chasing a buck can ultimately have on a place if the values of community and unity aren’t at the forefront of everyone’s decisions all the time.
You’re here for a low-stakes, low-stress time, and that’s what Discounty delivers.
This never gets too deep, but the themes are there, and it’s enough to keep you investing in a little more than just mindlessly stocking shelves and punching numbers in on a cash register from sun up to sun down. The game isn’t going to hit you hard emotionally ever, but I think that’s okay.You’re here for a low-stakes, low-stress time, and that’s what Discounty delivers.
All of this is nicely presented in nice and appealing pixel-ish art with a looping soundtrack for each location and time of day that invokes Animal Crossing vibes on top of the Stardew-ness of the rest of the experience. Ultimately, you’ll kind of already know if this game is for you if you’ve liked similar games in the past too.
Relatable Premise, Addicting Loop
Discounty has a simple structural setup that gets you into the flow of the game quickly. Your grocery store is closed Sundays, but Monday-Saturday, you’ll wake up at 6am, open your store by 9am, close up at 5pm, then have until midnight to do whatever else you please in the shop or around town.
Days run on a timer like Stardew, with each passing minute being about a second of real world time. This seems like it would put some pressure on you since you’re always watching the clock, but there really aren’t penalties for… anything.
…you will surely fall into a truly addicting and rewarding loop as you operate the store…
Open up the shop late? Eh, no one cares. Worried about staying out beyond midnight? No big deal, the game will just automatically send you to bed and wake you back up at 6am the next morning. No harm, no foul. I like that this takes the pressure off of you in some ways, but I also think keeping the stakes so consistently low with no fear of failure can be a detriment at times as well.
Regardless, you’re here to run a grocery store, and you’ll have a lot to manage here. Working with a sort of grid system, you place/purchase/upgrade shelves and coolers. You order products and organize a storeroom. You keep products stocked on the sales floor. You clean up messes with a mop because your customers can’t keep their darn shoes clean, apparently. You recycle empty boxes.
The star of the show, however, is running the cash register, as silly as that might seem. It’s downright satisfying to memorize the prices of all your products and manually punch them into the keypad. Eventually, you can upgrade to a barcode scanner that speeds up the process greatly, but I’d also be lying if I said I didn’t miss the math required to total items on the fly during a rush too.
Once the store closes, you’ll spend time restocking shelves andrevamp your layoutto prepare for the next day, then spend free time running various fetch quests for your neighbors all while unraveling story beats along the way that are never mind-blowingly interesting, but charming and rewarding nonetheless.
As mundane as everything may sound,you will surely fall into a truly addicting and rewarding loop as you operate the store, order more inventory from a delivery driver, unlock new store upgrades and items to sell, and repeat indefinitely as yousee your money go up and up. It’s nothing crazy creative, but it does feel good to put in an honest day’s work consistently.
Could’ve Gone Deeper
The thing is, as much as I got into the “one more day”-style loop of it all, I did ultimately find myself wanting a little more from the grocery sim aspect of the game. You have some agency in the decisions you make for the shop, like store layout and decorations, but I wanted more control once I got really, really good at running everything the game allowed me to.
For example, you can’t adjust the prices of anything you sell. Everything comes with a preset, standard price, and that’s that. You also physically cannot charge a customer the wrong price for an item, whether intentionally or by accident.
I was so worried about mischarging someone that I didn’t even notice any of this until about five hours into Discounty, when I finally keyed the wrong price for a carton of skim milk, and the game simply didn’t let it go through.
This, again, plays into the fact that Discounty is a low-stress venture, but I didn’t need it to bethisforgiving either. Let me cut a customer a good deal if I want to make their day. Or let me try to overcharge someone and get away with it to pocket a little extra money. Let me jack up the prices of a hot item that I know everyone will pay for based on demand. But Discounty just says, “Nah, don’t worry about that stuff.”
I understand this design choice if the team really just wanted to present something breezy and stress-free, but I also just wish I had more stakes to motivate me to operate as efficiently as possible day in and day out. No quests have timers either, so it really ultimately boils down to doing things at whatever pace you want with no sense of urgency or true need to be the best store possible.
Your mileage will vary here depending on what type of experience you’re looking for. But about halfway through this 10-or-so hour experience, I started to wish I had a little more to manage and contend with.
Clean Up On Aisle 2 Needed
The other thing to point out is that Discounty also has some occasional optimization issues that can be frustration points. Nothing is game-breaking, but several are things I just had to learn to accept and deal with, which isn’t ever really a great feeling in a video game.
You’re always trying to keep your customers happy, and you’ll get monetary bonuses (and a trophy) if you manage to do this successfully enough. Things like long waits in the cashier line and being out of products on a customer’s shopping list can prevent this.Somany times, I’d have customers leaving the shop angry about things that simply were not my fault at all.
The worst example of this is that, for the entire second half of the game, I’d have shoppers that would get completely stuck in various corners of the store. They’d enter the shop as early as 9am, then freeze in place until the store closed at 5pm. As a result, they’d get mad at me that they didn’t finish their shopping lists, and then had to wait in a long line as all the people unfroze at once and rushed the register.
I’d also consistently have customers that would enter the store at 4:55pm, then get upset when the game automatically kicked them out of the store at 5:00pm when we closed. Maybe this is just to simulate annoying shoppers you’d get in real life, but this happened almost every day, and directly affected my bottom line every single time.
None of this was ever my fault, and that’s really frustrating in a game where you’d be capable of running things perfectly if it weren’t for weird glitches like these completely beyond your control. Ultimately, I just had to accept that this is how the game worked, but that’s not a great feeling at the end of the day.
Aside from this, I counted around five typos, had two hard crashes that lost me an entire day’s work, and had several instances of NPCs vanishing in mid-conversation, or the completely wrong set of dialogue lines populating for characters out of nowhere. These are things I’m totally fine overlooking, but combined with the poor performance of the things thatdiddirectly impact my gameplay, these other little things just felt a bit more noticeable.
Closing Comments:
Discounty is the right type of cozy game that you can get completely lost inside for a few days. It thrives in the “Just one more day” zone and has an addictive loop that feels good as a distraction from the real world. At the end of the day, I wish it went a bit deeper with some of its systems to make the grocery store sim aspects a little more fleshed out, and some optimization hiccups are genuine bummers and frustrations at times. Still, I’ve enjoyed my time in the small town of Blomkest and feel ready to run my own store someday.
