Game: Discounty
Genre: Simulation, RPG, Lifestyle
System: Nintendo Switch/Switch 2 (Also on Steam (Windows), Xbox One/X/S and PS4/5)
Developer | Publisher: Crinkle Cut Games | PQube
Age Rating: US Everyone | EU 3+
Price: US $19.99 | UK £16.99 | EU € 19,99
Release Date: August 21st, 2025
Review code used, with many thanks to Press Engine.
As the debut game for Danish indie studio Crinkle Cut Games, Discounty lets you take on the management of your aunt’s discount supermarket. I’m not a stranger to running a shop, after all, I took on the challenge in Convenience Stories, let’s see if Discounty will prove to be an inspiring shopping experience or a rough deal.
Heading to Blomkest and Discounty
Discounty starts with you creating your character. There isn’t a vast amount of styles in the customisation menu, but with quite a few colours, you’ll spend time perfecting that pixelated look. However, if you’re not happy, you can use the mirror in your trailer to change.
Discounty continues with an interactive cutscene of a bus ride. Apparently you owe your aunt a favour and are heading towards the sleepy backwater town of Blomkest, to help run the Discounty franchise supermarket your aunt has. The conversation with the bus driver reveals that Blomkest was once a thriving hub. As the story progresses, you’ll learn that since Sparcliffe took over the county administrative hub, Blomkest has suffered.
As soon as you arrive, Aunt Tellar takes you to see her shop and with the help of her assistant Grace, you’ll start learning the basics.
However with strange noises from the shed next to your trailer and vans with radioactive symbols on them outside the shop, things are not what they seem.
Running your Discounty
Grace will explain how to manage the shop, with its shelves and coolers and store room where stock crates are placed. Grace is an excellent teacher, you’ll get to practise serving customers, learn how to re-order from the Delivery Guy, how to use the personal digital assistant (which stores story progress and customer information), and of course, how to use the till. There’s little time to restock whilst the shop is open, although I did try to carry a few spare apples and bottles of milk in my pockets.
In other games, selling is a simple press of a button, you might get to negotiate slightly, but the checkout process is simplified. In Discounty you need to work the till, and individually enter the prices and amounts. You have a reference booklet containing prices and the quantity of items is clearly seen on screen. You don’t need to do the maths, but use the left stick to enter the numbers on the keypad. Initially, mistakes aren’t too costly, as your customers wait patiently, whilst you get the price and quantity correct. However, it won’t be long before a customer will be unhappy with the wait and leave the shop angry.
Using the number pad does get easier, especially when you realise you don’t need to enter the 1x and if you can do the maths, you can enter that instead. Later on in the game you’ll unlock a barcode reader which makes playing a lot easier, as you just need to rotate the item to the side with the barcode on it.
As well as ensuring you’ve got enough stock, Aunt Tellar wants you to negotiate trade deals to boost sales. However it’s not as straightforward as it seems and you’ll have to carry out side missions to gain the trust of the other residents, such as selling Christmas flavoured fish sticks and rounding up sheep from around the town, which baa sweetly as you get close.
As time progresses you’ll be able to unlock other items, like bigger pockets or new products, through the reward scheme, but you’ll have other tasks to do, like cleaning the floor and picking up litter. Aunt Tellar is keen for Discounty to grow, and before long, you’ll be expanding.
A Day in the Life of the Discounty Manager
Waking at 06:00, you’ll have time to restock on any of the trade deal items and check the local hardware store for new shop fittings. You can get item boosters, and larger coolers and shelves will become available as you expand.
You need to open the shop at 09:00, although you can fast forward to that time, if you have everything ready. Time whilst managing the shop goes quicker than outside shop hours, so soon it’s 17:00 and the shop shuts, giving you an hour to clear the queues. There is then a marketing summary, which shows you how well your day went in terms of customer satisfaction and items sold. This is a little frustrating, as it clicks through each individual item sold, and there is no way to skip.
You then have until midnight to re-stock, and complete any of the tasks. The planner keeps track of the objectives, with helpful hints about whether the task is possible to complete at that point. The story progresses quite quickly, with most of the objectives relatively easy to complete. That said, there is still 20+ hours of gameplay.
Discounty doesn’t open on a Sunday, so you get up later and can explore the town in the daylight. This is a great opportunity to complete customer relation events – little insights into the residents of Blomkest. Some form part of the trade deals and main goals, but not all of them. So once you’ve completed the story, you can still play and finish these events. The colours in Discounty are quite muted, but it’s generally early morning or late evening. However, there were a couple of times when I struggled to see the characters on screen. If you think this might affect your enjoyment, check out the demo.
Gameplay
Discounty guides you really well through the controls and gameplay. There is no touchscreen functionality, but the font is large enough to read in handheld mode on the OLED screen.
The loading time between areas is slightly long, and there is occasionally an odd screen movement, but these don’t stop the enjoyment. There are also some inconsistencies the pop-up information which doesn’t reflect the item selected and there are a few typo errors. The developers are still polishing and fixing non-gameplay issues, so hopefully, these will be resolved very shortly.
A Discounty day takes about 20 minutes to play, although it could take longer as the in-game time pauses during conversations and there are rather a lot!. The game will save when you sleep at night.
Conclusion
Discounty is more than a shop simulator. It’s a clever and humorously written story, where you play through the main goals and tasks to fulfil Aunt Tellar’s expansion plans and expose the mysteries in Blomkest. Yes, you can just run the shop, but trying to become a real supermarket and finding out about the dysfunctional town is where the game really shines.
Final Verdict: I Like it a Lot 
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