Discounty Review – A Cosy Stardew-Valley-Style Supermarket Simulator

While not the first ‘cosy’ game, Stardew Valley has been massively influential and has given rise to multiple games that want to follow in its muddy bootprints. Discounty is its own game, but there’s undeniably a lot of Stardew Valley‘s DNA in its design, right down to the main character moving to a little town in the middle of nowhere to start a whole new life. Except this time, it’s a supermarket you’re running and not a farm.

You’ve been recruited to come to the tiny town of Blomkest to help run and expand a supermarket named Discounty, all at the behest of your Aunt Teller. Not all the locals love this idea, especially when you start trying to grow the store into something bigger. In what is fast becoming a trope of the cosy sub-genre, the quiet little town is inhabited by people who hold many secrets and are not what they first appear to be. Of course, this is a chill game so it isn’t like you’re dealing with a cast of brooding serial killers, adulterers and nutcases, but they’ve all got their own little stories to be uncovered.

Platforms: PC, Xbox Series S/X, PlayStation 5, Switch
Reviewed On: PS5
Developed By:
Published By: PQube Limited

Disclosure: I received a free review copy of this product from https://www.keymailer.com
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The meat and potatoes of the game is the day-to-day running of Discounty itself. Operating the shop is a matter of laying down shelves and coolers which hold the various products you want to stock. In the backroom, you’ll store all the crates containing your goods, and order up new deliveries. Figuring out the ideal layout is a part of the fun, because customers will come in with a set shopping list but will also make impulse purchases too, based on what they see, its appeal level, the advertising posters you’ve put up around town and more.

As you gently unravel the various little narrative threads woven throughout the game’s 8-12 hours, the shop will expand. You’ll continue to unlock more products to stock, along with different types of shelves that can either hold more goods, or are much more visually appealing. There’s also boosters to get that can be placed around the shop to make types of products even more enticing. It won’t take long before you’re just as nefarious about planning as a real supermarket – if I block this aisle, it’ll force people around all of these other nice things, and maybe I’ll put this really nice shelf in front of the door. Oh, and what about some chocolate right next to the checkout, along with energy drink? Yeah, that’ll do it.

You can’t just passively sit around, either, as you have to ensure shelves stay stocked to avoid customers getting upset, and clean up any spills on aisle 7 with your trusty bucket and mop. Most importantly, you must check out the customers, which involves inputting the cost of each item on a keypad. For a cosy game, it sure is stressful to bang out numbers in a hurry. For those of us not gifted with the magical power of doing maths in our heads, there’s a multiplication button. Later in the game, you can spend some reward points – earned for completing challenges like selling X amount of eggs etc – on a scanner to make parting customers from their money even easier.

The mornings, evenings and every Sunday are when you get to do things outside of the shop, although everything you do still revolves around it, ultimately. A major part of the first half of the game is setting up trade deals with a few of the locals, with each of them also offering up perks for selling enough of their stuff. You’ll need to drop by on certain days to pick up more stock from them. And, of course, outside of the shop is where you typically advance the story, usually by talking to the various citizens and helping them out. That might mean chatting to Elmer, the slightly useless local mayor, or seeing what Tammy is up to in her pollution spewing factory outside of town.

On paper, the whole gameplay loop of running the shop and exploring the town doesn’t sound very exciting. In fact, it sounds like having a job and a social life, things I try very hard to avoid. But the reality is far better, a satisfying loop that taps into the relaxation centre of your brain like a shopkeeper taps into your wallet via sugary snacks and a sneakily worded buy 1 for the price of 2 and get 1 free deal.

I did find the game dragging at the end, though, in large part because of the gameplay. After numerous hours, having to restock the shelves every day went from being a part of the job to a chore. The game tries to mitigate it a little by giving you an employee and shelves that hold more of each product, but it was still a drag. Re-arranging was the biggest issue, though, because there’s really no good way of doing it. Your limited store space and inventory space means that, later in the game, it’s really difficult to move everything around without it being time-consuming, clunky and annoying. The various objectives start to feel a bit too stretched out, too, so by hour 12, I was more than ready for it to end.

Except that when it does end, it still somehow feels rather…abrupt. The final quests don’t seem to be building toward a finale, so when it pops up it’s rather jarring, like you were reading a book that has 500 pages but the story just ends on page 450 and the rest are blank, leaving one big question in particular unanswered. There’s a final choice to make, and then you’re free to keep playing the game, albeit it with no extra content. It’s just you and the shop…forever, and ever, and ever, and ever…………… Are we sure this isn’t a horror story in disguise? Is this purgatory?

Earlier, I mentioned this being a ‘cosy’ game, so I had best explain what I mean by that. Essentially, you can’t really fail Discounty. Even if you somehow do terribly and barely bring in any money, the game will keep going, and you can easily get things back on track. While tooltips urge you to hurry home for midnight, there’s absolutely no penalty if you don’t make it back to bed – you collapse, and awaken the next morning in bed just like normal. Likewise, the shop opens at 9:00 every day, and if you don’t head back by 9:15 the game teleports you instead.

There’s not quite the freedom of Stardew Valley to be found in the cosiness, though. In Stardew Valley, you can ignore pretty much any aspect of the game, whether that’s abandoning the farming to focus on mining, or spending all of your time talking to the locals. In Discounty, you can’t choose not to open the shop if you fancy doing something else that day.

All of this is wrapped up in a glorious pixel-art aesthetic. At this point, the vibrant, cosy pixel style is becoming a little bit generic and overplayed, so its nice to see Discounty add a few little twists of its own, like the bandy-legged designs of all the characters.

Finally, I want to discuss a tricky topic. You see, I usually try to review a game for what it is rather than what I wanted it to be. And yet, I can’t help but shake the feeling that Discounty wanted to be so much more, and had the potential to be much bigger than it was, given its 5-year development time. Multiple abandoned buildings in town and in the forest hint toward you being able to buy them, or maybe other people re-opening them as your shop brings more money into the town, yet they remain empty. Then there’s your home, a meagre little caravan that has almost no space for extra decorations. With all of the money the shop is bringing in, why am I still in a caravan? Honestly, there are probably a dozen things I could point to that felt like they were going to go somewhere and didn’t.

Perhaps this is deliberate, the developers leaving themselves somewhere to go in future updates or paid DLC? I’m open to that, although it wouldn’t stop Discounty from having launched in a state that feels unfinished. But then again, at $20, maybe this is enough? Or maybe Stardew Valley has spoiled us with its absurd generosity. I’ll leave that up to you.

Discounty may not have the bottomless depth or polish of its genre-mates, and its abrupt ending and unfulfilled ideas can leave you feeling like you’ve been locked in the shop after closing. Yet for most of its runtime it’s a charming, quietly addictive loop of stocking shelves, chatting with quirky townsfolk and scheming over chocolate placement. If you’re after a cosy time sink with a dash of supermarket strategy — and can forgive some unfinished aisles — Discounty is worth rolling your trolley into.