Supermarket Times

My spreadsheet brain does not normally have much use for a sub-two-hour point-and-click with no resource loop, no tech tree, and no late-game crisis to manage. Yet here I am writing about Supermarket Times, which managed to hold my attention in ways I did not predict. Rabbit Hole Games, a small UK indie outfit, built something genuinely strange: a hand-drawn supermarket populated by characters who feel lifted from a British sitcom written by someone who dislikes everyone slightly. You wander the aisles, inspect products, talk to shoppers, and complete a set of so-called legendary tasks. None of the tasks make normal sense. That is deliberate, and that is where the game lives or dies for you personally. The structure is looser than most sim-adjacent titles. There is no money to manage, no queue timer ticking down, no efficiency score. Instead you browse a trolley-based task list and work through objectives at your own pace across a surprisingly large map of interconnected supermarket zones. The point-and-click interactions are simple: click an item to inspect it, click characters to trigger dialogue, discover how the various tasks chain together. Some objectives are obvious, others require a bit of lateral thinking to unlock. The map supports fast travel between areas, which prevents the game from becoming a chore even at its short runtime. The hand-drawn art style, coloured pencils and felt-tip vibes, gives everything a deliberately scruffy warmth that suits the tone. Audio is handled by a single northern English narrator doing gruff off-the-cuff commentary on whatever you click, plus a cast of characters apparently all voiced by the same person using a very broad range of accents. The soundtrack is upbeat background noise, intentionally forgettable. Here is the tension the game cannot fully resolve. Its best moments are genuinely weird and funny in the way that only confident absurdism can be: the product names, the stranger interactions, the secret tucked away somewhere in the store that players are encouraged to find on their own. Critics, including a four-star notice from The Guardian, pointed to this core weirdness as the reason to play. But a review from Indie-Hive flagged a real problem: some of the humour overshoots absurdist and lands in territory that is just uncomfortable without being clever. References to perverts, thinly veiled social mockery, and accent-based characterisation that edges toward lazy rather than satirical. If crass-for-crass-sake comedy bounces off you just fine, this is a minor complaint. If that category of joke kills your enjoyment dead, you should know it is present throughout. As a strategy and sim specialist I feel duty-bound to be honest: there is nothing to optimise here. No build order, no efficiency target, no post-game. The decision-making depth is essentially zero. What Supermarket Times offers instead is a very specific flavour of interactive comedy, more like a short adventure game than any simulation the genre tag implies. On that basis, the runtime of under two hours is about right. Asking for more would probably stretch the joke past its elastic limit. It is a one-sitting experience and it knows it. Achievements add a small nudge toward completing all legendary tasks and finding hidden content, which gives completionists a reason to poke around every corner before credits roll.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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