Discounty review – the joys of retail management

Imagine Stardew Valley but with a mini-supermarket and you’ll have an inkling of the strange pleasures that await in new indie game Discounty.

On paper, management sims sound almost unbearably dull. It’s a pity, because despite appearing to be a lot of workmanlike admin, the good ones can be enormously addictive. But games such as Two Point Museum and Planet Coaster. There’s something powerfully alluring about setting up systems, seeing how they work, and making incremental improvements. It creates a feedback loop that can be hard to put down once you get going.

Developed by Danish studio Crinkle Cut Games, Discounty’s take on retail management really nails that loop, and has a lot more character than most of its genre. Presented in blocky pixel art style, its fictional isometric town, Blomkest, is home to a bunch of oddballs, not least of whom is your aunt, Tellar, whose shop you’ve been hired to run. Before you’ve even got as far as figuring out how to use the cash register, the town presents you with a clutch of mysteries.

What are the strange noises coming from Tellar’s shed? Why is the road to the Ragged Forest barricaded with pixel art biohazard warning signs? And should you be worried by reports of poisonous fog? But before you can busy yourself with Blomkest’s overarching truths you’ll need to focus on running your aunt’s shop, where you’ll find there’s always plenty to do.

Starting with a small, rectangular retail space, with a storage room and loading bay behind it, your job is to provide Blomkest’s residents with groceries. That means ordering goods from wholesalers, stacking them on shelves, and then manning the checkout to ring up everyone’s baskets as rapidly as possible. If customers get what they came for and it doesn’t take too long to pay, they leave satisfied, which encourages more people to shop with you on subsequent days.

To help with that process you can print out posters promoting your supermarket at City Hall and post them around town. They get removed once a week, so you’ll need to keep doing it to maintain the effect, but between your ongoing poster campaign and actually providing a good service, you can help ensure your initially tiny retail empire keeps growing.

Driving sales is about more than just advertising and ensuring adequate stock levels, though. As shoppers look for the goods they came for, they will also make impulse buys, and you can assist in that process by adding in-store promotion, whether that’s an aquarium to help sell fresh fish, or a giant bottle of pop to shift more soft drinks.

Layout also makes a noticeable difference. Aesthetics are one thing but arranging your stock so that visitors have to wander past as many merchandising stands as possible on their way to commonly purchased items really helps trigger impulse purchases. At the end of each day, you’ll be able to see a customer satisfaction survey, which also tells you how much shoppers spent both on the things they intended to buy, and stuff they fancied on the spur of the moment.

It gives you food for thought for the last few waking hours of each working day, after the store’s closed. That gives you time to re-stock shelves, reorder from the Delivery Guy (whose real name is Gus, but says it’s okay to call him Guy), and edit your shop’s layout to maximise sales opportunities. You’ll also need to clean up any dirt that accumulates on floors, and as if that wasn’t already a full to-do list, make and expand trade deals with local vendors.

Local produce has a higher margin than generic grocery items an you’ll also find that doing those deals gets you more involved with Blomkest’s people and problems, embroiling you in the town’s shady businesses. It’s where Discounty shines, and starting to uncover the area’s ghastly secrets, you find out there’s a lot more going on that just trying to break the fish canning monopoly, so you can sell the local fisherman’s catch of the day.

There’s social commentary, alongside the gradual unlocking of higher tiers of each trade deal, the game’s understated and mildly subversive sense of humour taking aim not only at video games, but political corruption and the cynicism of late stage capitalism, amongst other things. Not that any of the frippery gets in the way of the action, which gradually escalates in complexity.

While you start with a single shop front, you soon expand into neighbouring premises, adding new aisles and warehouse space as your retail hegemony extends, while completing daily and weekly challenges earns loyalty points with Discounty’s franchise owner. This lets you upgrade your shop with new product lines and equipment – moving from laboriously keying in each price individually at the checkout to simply swiping barcodes is a mini-revolution all on its own.

The town is well laid out, and navigating it soon becomes second nature, obviating the need to consult its map. It has convenient shortcuts between oft-used facilities, making it straightforward to bring your freshly compacted cardboard and plastic packaging to the recycling centre – which is handily also next door to the hardware shop that supplies extra shelves, coolers, and in-store promotions.

Placing items in your store can be a bit finicky, as can picking them up again, but the biggest complaint is that there’s a firm and final end point, and it arrives just as everything seems to be in full swing. The game comes to what feels like quite a sudden close and, without spoiling any of its mildly amusing plot, it would have been nice to be able to carry on building the shop, even after solving the town’s mysteries.

When your most significant whinge about a game is that you want it to go on for longer, you know it must be doing well, and so it is with Discounty. It’s a cracking management sim dressed up with an unusually characterful plot, its retail expansion gameplay loop proving highly compelling while it lasts. Just don’t expect it to take over your life for long.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £15.99
Publisher: PQube
Developer: Crinkle Cut Games
Release Date: 21st August 2025
Age Rating: 3

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