As a person who has worked customer service for most of my life, it's odd that I'm always drawn to games that lets me maintain a shop and serve customers. Discounty by Crinkle Cut Games and published by PQube aims to marry together the cozy shop keeping RPG gameplay along with a focus on the narrative around the small, near-desolate town of Blomkest.

In Discounty, you have a 24hr game time (each real life second is 1 minute) where you go about your daily activities of running your budding supermarket, managing inventory, fraternizing with the townsfolks; alongside solving the drama, mysteries, and controversies surrounding Blomkest and expanding a supermarket. The gameplay loop is separated between 2 main parts: your shop & interacting with the town and its people. 

Your Store, Discounty 🏬

Your Aunt Tellar roped you into fulfilling her dream by coming to the quiet town of Blomkest to run her convenience store and turn it into a full blown supermarket. You wake up at 6:00, open the store and serve customers at 9:00 until closing time at 17:00. Much of the gameplay surrounds you managing Discounty, both during your shift and off.

✅ task based store progression
✅ great Point of Sale controls
✅ great selection of items
✅ extremely satisfying SFX when the store opens

In your humble beginnings, you have a small store separated into 3 sections: the sales floor, the storage room, and the office. 

The office's main purpose is to house your computer that will allow you to manage your inventory, ordering more product to sell. You can also participate in Discounty Challenges where you can gain points for accomplishing random tasks. You can then use these points to improve what you sell, your POS, and even your pocket size. It's a fun way to challenge yourself to sell specific items or prioritize specific activities in order to improve your store. However, I did feel as if the points system could've used more depth as I had 30+ unused points by the time I finished the game even with minimal effort.

The storage room is pretty self explanatory. You can place your excess inventory in it and organize it in any way you want to maximize efficiency. It also has a loading dock, where Guy the Delivery Guy will drop off the products you've ordered. Besides your stock, you can also place decorative furnitures like the ones that increases a type of item's appeal. It's a good idea to hoard several of each type (Processed, Produce, Animal Products, Drinks, Seafood & Household) in case you are tasked to sell specific types of items.

Unfortunately, even though shelves and coolers are considered as furnitures, you can't store unused ones in the storage room, forcing me to leave them on the sales floor if I planned on using it later. Or, toss them...This unfortunately discouraged me from playing around with my sales floor layout as having to deal with excess furniture with no where to put them, as well as limited pocket space, meant that I would need to toss them and repurchase them whenever necessary which is an unnecessary money sink. 

Lastly, the sales floor is where the magic happens. Customers come in, ready with their shopping list, pick up their goods, then pay. Based on product appeal, you can incentivize certain product types, and get some impulse purchases from them. Once done, they will then head over to the Point of Sale. This is probably what sold me on Discounty. The controls for the registers is intuitive and satisfying. You are given a list of products and their costs so you know how much to charge your customers on the left side of the screen. On the right side is your register where you have to manually input the cost of each item and cashing them out. This may sound complicated and tedious, but just like a regular job, practice and repetition makes you a pro. Coupled with great use of the analog stick to quickly press the numbers and the Dualsense' Adaptive Triggers to complete the transaction.

❌ no way to skip daily recap
❌ targeting items is difficult
❌ Queuing to pay is based on who is "finished" instead of who is already in line
❌ customers getting stuck lowering my C.A.R.
❌ missed opportunity for store customization (ie wall ads etc)

This gameplay loop unfortunately isn't without flaws and made the last third of the game feel like a chore to play. 

Small attention to polish makes me feel as if they needed more testers. One of the biggest things that took away from the fun of shopkeeping is the Marketing Recap at the end of each business day. Your PDA will pop up giving you in-depth look at your performance for the day. Things like how many customers left happy, my C.A.R. (Customer Approval Rating) percentage for the last 3 days which dictates likeliness they come back, and EACH. ITEM. SOLD. This is NOT SKIPPABLE. WHY?! It disrupts the pace of the game, especially since there is a tab in your PDA where you can see this report at any time. This only gets worse as your store gets bigger and busier.

And with great power comes great responsibilities. The bigger my store got, the busier it got. Typically I welcome this micro managing challenge, however, targeting difficulties, customer queueing AI, and clipping bugs didn't set me up for success. 

Talking to people, interacting with items, carrying stock, and using my inventory are all relegated to one button, X. Accidental presses due to difficult targeting in tight areas when theres items and customers everywhere could potentially be avoided by having a different button between talking with NPCs and using or placing items.

Another thing I noticed was that the queuing system when it's time to pay is based on who completes their shopping list first, not based on who lines up first. This means that I could have three customers standing in line, doing nothing because they arrived at the register, meanwhile slow-poke Mrs. Andersen completed her shopping list first, but she's walking slowly from the other side of the store! All the while depleting the customer's patience value as they wait for their turn to check out.

Customers clipping and getting stuck on shelves or pathways didn't help this situation. The only thing that got them unstuck is when the time hits 17:00 and it's time to close, meaning they would all pile up at the register at the same time, only giving me 1 hour (60 seconds) to check them all out, or they leave in a tantrum. This is a bug that I noticed that started occurring for me in chapter 3 (the last chapter) which is at the height of the story with bigger sales requirements and bigger challenges. This really hindered my fun with Discounty where if I had stopped playing prior to chapter 3, I would've given this game a much higher score.

The Quiet Town of Blomkest

You arrive in the quiet town of Blomkest as you begin your what seems like a typical cozy-game like experience. A small, decrepit, quiet, dwindling town with a failing economy and a relegated government lies within it some drama and mysteries. Although quiet, the town still has entrepreneurs that may be able to help Discounty thrive, albeit reluctantly.

✅ beautiful pixel art world
✅ 4 main areas
✅ narrative driven progression
✅ interesting characters
❌ could use more side quests to build up NPCs
❌ many NPC side quests are locked/bugged
✅ increase stock variety through business deals
❌ feels like there should've been a 5th business partner by the Town Hall

You open a store for your Aunt in a town that is reluctant to change, perfectly happy with the day-to-day. Aunt Tellar's desire for expansion brings about drama within the town and its inhabitants. 

The town is separated in 4 main map areas: Blomkest Midtown, the Forest, Farm, and the Harbour. Each one is well designed, easy to traverse and great to look at, the art style well embodying the town's atmosphere. 

Midtown Blomkest is where most of the business is, housing a Town Hall with a less-than-useful county representative, a gossiping barkeep, town handy man and hardware expert and many other interesting characters. The town also has several buildings and locations that never truly gets explored or utilized, which may be part of the overall narrative, but I wish it were. I feel like there was cut content or maybe room for a future DLC as there is an icon to the left of the Town Hall that indicates where shipments are dropped and it was not used throughout the whole game as well as a building that I can go inside of, but has served absolutely zero purpose, except maybe tell the time, not to mention the fact that it's got a cool bridge that connects to Elmer's office! 

✅ great atmosphere and world building
✅ fast travel through sewage system
❌ several unused locations
❌ unexplored topics

The sounds and atmosphere of the Farm and Forest is completely different to Midtown Blomkest. These 2 areas are not accessible early in the game as it's plagued with a potentially dangerous fog, which is an ongoing problem through the game. The interesting thing about Discounty is that it is very narrative driven, which sets it apart from typical games in this genre. While we do have a clock and Sun-Mon schedule, the game isn't heavily reliant on this. What drives the game forward is the story, which is quite refreshing. The sounds, and atmosphere in these two locations reflects this well. The way the town looks is reflected by where you are in the story's progress.

Both the Forest and Farm are mysterious, empty, and dark. Aside from the two business partners in the Forest (Tammy in the Factory, ) and in the Farm (Farmer Karl), much of this area is, again, unexplored, often only interacting with it at least once or twice throughout the game, if at all. To top it all off, it's quite a drag to traverse through as the fast travel within these areas are unlocked way too late in the game, not to mention that one of those fast travels takes you to a completely unused part of the forest! 

✅ fitting BGM 
✅ fantastic SFX within the town and store

Lastly, we have the Harbour. This is probably my favourite are in the game. Aside from the main town, it truly encapulates the atmosphere of the overall game in such a concise, well designed area. It's dank, dirty, and full of (unrealized) potential. Similar to the forest and farm, much of the story happens here and also houses our two other business partners (Fisher the fisherman and Barbara). However, similar to the rest of the areas in the game, it still feels under-utilized, especially since the biggest building in the area is mostly useless except for plastering Discounty posters on it.

Thankfully the overall narrative and quest driven progression does a well enough job to drive it home and deliver the overall message of the game. 

⚙️ ACCESSIBILITY/OPTIONS

✅ 11 language options 

Discounty has 11 language options: English, German, Spanish, Cantonese, Mandarin, Portuguese, French, Korean, Japanese, Italian, and Danish

Thanks for Playing!

Discounty had the recipe for a very fun, very addictive gameplay loop that is reminiscent of typical cozy games.  Fans of the genre will have expectations and the lack of polish in performance severely hindering gameplay and fun, some seemingly incomplete gameplay features, and a world that felt like it wasn't fully realized kept this game from being truly great. So much so that I'm left wondering if the game is finished. While many of these negatives can easily be adapted through and look past, they are numerous enough to impact overall enjoyment. 

Discounty will be released on August 20, 2025 and was played on PlayStation 5 Pro.
The game was provided by the publisher.

It's currently available on PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series, and PC.
It also has a demo available in these platforms.