It’s late at night and you’ve been out with your friends, regaling each other with stories of the past and just generally enjoying each others company. Then your friend, that one friend, inspired by either the several liters of high proof alcohol that are running through their system or some other divine source, utters those magical words that always seem to pop up around this time of the night:
“We should start a BUSINESS.”
Laughter erupts as you all yet again go through the motions with them, asking all the relevant questions to see just how far you can ride this thought train before it derails. It’s sometime before he relents that he doesn’t have all the answers, but this is something we definitely need to do and we’re the only crew of people who can make it happen.
Should you ever find yourself in that situation, and I feel most friendship groups have one person just like that, then there’s precious few better testing grounds than Supermarket Together. I say that as someone who’s played it with a bunch of highly successful friends and the entire thing was a brilliant and total disaster.
You can likely guess the premise already: run a supermarket together with some friends. All the fundamental parts of that experience are there: you’ll need to manage your inventory, take stock of what your customers are buying, adjust pricing to get certain products off the shelf and, of course, man the checkouts so people can actually buy what you’re selling. Then there’s the overarching goals of doing all that profitably, making sure you’re not moving too much inventory at a loss, losing money to giving customers the wrong change or skipping out on your loan payments. Like all good systems with relatively simple rules the complexity of behaviour that emerges from this system is astonishing and I feel even the most motivated teams would still manage to bollocks it up the first time around.
Just for giggles we all went into this pretty blind, knowing the general gist of what we needed to do but not how to optimise it. You can guess where this was going of course: complete and utter chaos as all of us decided to take on any role in the supermarket we wanted whether or not someone was already doing it. The result was as expected: us bleeding money left and right, products not moving off shelves and, just to top it off, hundreds of dollars in change walking right out the door. A fantastic view into how a business run by us yahoos would eventuate.
After a while we did start to get our groove and there were calls for us to start all over again so we could we start with a fresh slate. We didn’t do that though and the weight of our previous decisions came back to haunt us with reckless abandon. The loan payments we had to make, which we took out because we couldn’t buy stock (due to some interesting demolition decisions which, unexpectedly, cost a lot) wiped out any profit we made in a day. This then caused the loan sharks, which we did not know were the source of said funds, to show up and start whooping our asses at random intervals throughout the day. Combining this with the random beatings that we were already conducting on each other it made achieving the core directive that much more challenging, but we were determined.
In the end, whilst we didn’t get to a place of repeatable profitability, we did manage to settle into a good rhythm that was on the upwards path. Someone was in charge of stock ordering, others would get things out on shelves, and those of us who had experience in running the tills in real life (thank you numpad muscle memory) started getting customers out the door in a brisk pace. Would it have been easier if we’d started over? Probably, but there’s something to be said for finding order in all the chaos we created for ourselves.
Supermarket Together is a fantastic sandbox for mucking about with your crew, trying to do something that, on the surface, is really easy but can be thrown totally of the rails by just some simple mucking about. Like all co-op games of the same nature the real stories are the ones you build with each other inside it, the game is just there to facilitate that kind of interaction that you might not otherwise get. Are there things to improve? Absolutely but in the end the rough edges, the weird things, the simple yet chaotic nature of it are things that should endear you to the game. That’s not for everyone of course but for a game shared with a bunch of mates it certainly gets the job done.
Rating: 8.0/10
Supermarket Together is available on PC right now for free or, if you’re a cool guy, you can get the DLC for $7.50. Total play time was 1.6 hours with 10% of the achievements unlocked.
