These are the games I’ve been obsessing over (includes medieval themed ones):

Super Mini Mart - https://store.steampowered.com/app/1914060/Super_Mini_Mart/

Winkeltje: The Little Shop - https://store.steampowered.com/app/949290/Winkeltje_The_Little_Shop/

inKONBINI: One Store. Many Stories - https://store.steampowered.com/app/2723430/inKONBINI_One_Store_Many_Stories/

Cozy Keep: Farm, Craft, Manage - https://store.steampowered.com/app/2261350/Cozy_Keep_Farm_Craft_Manage/

Super Mini Mart is my favourite at the moment. It’s not perfect, but it’s a really chill experience. Staff are pretty useless, as they cost a lot and get in everyone’s way. It’s more fun to do everything myself anyway. It’s just a really satisfying game loop and I hope, as it develops, we get qol improvements like auto stock buying for essentials and auto stacking of goods by sell by date. That last one is important because I always end up waiting till all the stuff in the shop is gone before ordering more. That’s so that customers aren’t given so much choice that they never get around to buying stuff before it goes out of date. It gets 5 stars from me though, cos it’s really fun 🙂

Winkeltje was the game that got me into the whole shop running experience. The top down view is kind of restrictive though and it’s not nearly as fun as Super Mini Mart. I’d still give it a solid 3 stars. I love the screenshots of peoples fully developed shops but it feels like it would be such a huge amount of work to get there 😥.

inKonbini is just a demo at the moment, but it’s so atmospheric and lovely. I can’t wait to play the full game. It really leans into the fascinating culture of the Konbini store and the people who run them, as well as their relationships with their customers. It’s a deliberately slow paced, thoughtful game, and it’s really interesting that in the discussion groups, when someone recently asked for the devs to speed the main characters movement up, a ton of other players shouted all together to please NOT do that. It’s just a demo but I’d still give it 5 stars 😁.

Cozy Keep is basically Winkeltje in first person, as far as I’m concerned. I’m classing it as a supermarket sim because most of the same mechanics apply. You buy stock, including all the standard groceries, put it on display and sell it. Then you develop the shop, increase it’s appeal through decorations and reputation and sell more and more until you’re successful and the shop is thriving. It’s really fun, but maybe a little less accessible than Super Mini Mart. There’s kind of an overwhelming amount of different things to do as well, which I’m finding a little off-putting. Still giving it a good 3 stars though 😎.

I’ve seen that there are several other shop/supermarket type games out there, but I haven’t tried any so far. Do you know of any good ones? and are there any that have really cracked the hiring staff thing yet?

    • Novamdomum@fedia.ioOP
      2·
      2 days ago

      I would have said Super Mini Mart when I started this thread but then @Kolanaki mentioned Supermarket Simulator and I’ve been playing it ever since (13hrs so far lol). It’s got a few issues out of the box, including some oddly loud chirpy bird sounds but also has such an active nexus mod community that you can pretty much fix anything you want that you don’t like in it (including those damn birds😆). Id’ say give either that or Super Mini Mart a go. The inKonbini prologue demo is great too.

    • Novamdomum@fedia.ioOP
      2·
      3 days ago

      That looks pretty cool actually and I’ve just seen you can get self checkout tills too. Might have to give it a try. Not a big fan of them adding crime though. I used to run a shop a few years ago and crime was never a fun thing to have to deal with.

        • Novamdomum@fedia.ioOP
          2·
          3 days ago

          I just bought Supermarket Simulator and played it for 5 hours straight. It’s so addictive!! 😆 That birdsong gets on your nerves after a while but I saw there’s a mod that removes it so I’ll try that tomorrow.

  • Poopfeast420@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    5·
    3 days ago

    The only one I really played, but really got into was TCG Card Shop Simulator.

    It’s really just another Unity asset flip, really nothing special, but I think the TCG theme is more compelling to me, compared to other games like this. Also, you can open card packs, which is really neat. Eventually, you can have employees doing basically everything for you, so you’ll just be in charge of ordering new stock and opening packs to sell individual cards.

    Because it’s just another Unity game, there’s just a ton of mods already, even though the game is still in Early Access. Either QoL mods, Cheat mods, replace cards with whatever real TCG you want, whatever.

    I played for around 50h shortly after launch and pretty much did everything the game had at that time, although I used mods near the end, which did speed up things somewhat. There have been some updates since then, but nothing really that made me go back to the game yet.

    The game has a demo/free prologue, so you can check it out before you buy, but I don’t know how much stuff you can do in it.