As far as cozy games go, Discounty really bucks the trend by making you feel anxious and guilty about everything you’re doing every step of the way. Billed as a supermarket manager simulator, your main character moves to the small town of Blomkest where they must help their aunt (who’s almost certainly an evil capitalist) run their new supermarket, Discounty.
Unlike in most other cozy games where the townspeople mostly treat you with warmth and respect, here you’ll find that it’s easy to earn their ire just by simply existing. And for good reason, too. After all, your capitalist tendencies will inevitably lead you towards expansion, even at the cost of tearing down old buildings that have served as Blomkest’s oldest cultural touchstones. All in the name of more money. Long live capitalism!
But let’s start from the top. After creating your character, you’ll be shipped off to the quaint little town of Blomkest by bus. There, you’re introduced to your aunt Tellar, who wants you to help her run the Discounty supermarket. Even from your very first conversation with Tellar, it’s obvious that she maybe doesn’t have the town’s best interests at heart. She’s all about the profit margins, the KYC processes, you name it. While you do have an assistant to help you out at the start, it’s not long before she gets fired because Tellar needs to cut costs.
Then, the loop begins. You’ll order goods through the Discounty computer that you’ll use to stock your shelves. You’ll visit the local hardware store to buy shelves and coolers to display your goods. Eventually, you’ll even form trade deals with some of the local townspeople for new items that you can sell at Discounty. Because as Tellar says, local handmade goods fetch higher prices.
Your time in Discounty is split in two halves: running the supermarket, and making use of the town’s resources to help you run the supermarket better. When you’re not selling stuff, you’re printing posters at the town hall and pasting them all over Blomkest to attract more customers. You’re upgrading your trade deals to get more goods to sell during your shifts. You’re buying furniture and items that could help boost the appeal of certain products. Everything feeds back into the capitalist machine, and Discounty makes sure you’re very well aware of it every step of the way.
You’ll get to talk to the townspeople and know them better too, of course, but it’s here where Discounty starts to fall short a little bit. Unlike in other cozy games like Stardew Valley or Fields of Mistria, you don’t actually build relationships with them. Talking to them will let you learn more about the background, but it never goes any deeper than that. Like I said, everything you do only serves the supermarket.
It’s a good thing, then, that the actual supermarket gameplay is so fun. When you’re first getting started, you’ll only be armed with a calculator when manning the till. As customers bring their products to you, you’ll need to manually enter the price and quantity for each item to charge them. It’s slow going at first, but I rather loved the analogue nature of the calculator. As you continue progressing, you’ll eventually unlock a scanner, which lets you scan through items much faster.
And of course, doing well in Discounty will also allow you to order an even wider variety of goods for your store. At first, all I had were soda and apples. By the end of the game, I was serving up ground beef, different types of fish, coffee, pasta, you name it and I probably had it. Being able to expand your store really helps to open things up too, as part of the fun of Discounty is arranging your shelves and coolers in the most efficient possible way to help customers get to what they want quicker. Good arrangements also allow you to stock shelves faster, so you never run into cases where customers can’t find the thing they want.
There are some annoyances too, though. For instance, I realized that whenever customers queued up at the cashier, there would be some sort of invisible queue system that prevented customers that were already at the cashier from paying because they had to wait for another customer to reach the line first and have their items scanned. This would result in other customers having to spend a long time in line. There were also instances where the scanner could be a little finicky, where tilting the left stick in any direction wouldn’t actually move the item into the position it needs to be in to be scanned, resulting in more wasted time.
As your store expands, trying to keep all your shelves stocked also becomes more of a time-consuming chore than anything else. Your shift at Discounty ends at 5 p.m. everyday, but I’d find myself spending the next four in-game hours reorganizing my storage and restocking shelves. You’ll get another assistant much later in the game to help with restocking, but before that, it’s a serious slog.
Then, of course, there’s the fact that Discounty seems hellbent on making you feel guilty for doing your job. I wish I could say the game had something meaningful to say about corporate takeovers and capitalism, but it’s difficult to find any deeper meaning to it when the NPCs themselves also undermine their own crusade to take back their town. Maybe the message, then, is that there’s no escaping the wheel of profit margins and money.
Regardless, I enjoyed my time with Discounty, despite there not being all that much to the game besides the supermarket simulator stuff. With Discounty, you’re getting a solid 15 hours’ worth of story content, along with the ability to continue playing and running your supermarket long after that’s over. Even after the town of Blomkest has bent to your will, the wheel of capitalism never stops turning.
You can check out our review policy here. Reviewed on Switch 2.
