Discounty Review – Not Another Life Sim Clone

When a genre reaches a certain point of popularity, it’s hard to escape its gravitational pull. Life Sims are all the rage these days, with everything from spooky graveyard-based affairs to the more run-of-the-mill wholesome farming life experiences that we’ve all seen 1000 of over the past few years. You may be shocked to hear, then, that our Discounty review shows that this particular life sim has managed to avoid the pitfalls of being just another clone. 

What is Discounty?

Discounty is the debut title from Crinkle Cut Games, a small Danish studio formed back in 2021 with a small cultural grant. The game focuses on your character being invited to a small town to help your aunt run her shop. As you get to know the town and further your aunt's commercial empire, you learn more about the people you’re living with, and have to balance your desire for the business to be a success, as well as your desire not to completely destroy your new small-town home. 

If you’re thinking that things sound pretty familiar so far, then I don’t blame you. Everything from the journey to visit a distant relative who needs help with their business to the opening bus ride had me in mind of “yet another life sim game” with the same 8 or 9 tropes trotted out to give fans of the genre something new to do, or rather, a new environment to do it in.

However, it would be a mistake to discount (ha) Discounty as just another life sim game. Sure, there are a few tropes that persist, but the crux of the gameplay is pretty far removed from what is going on in most life sims. 

It’s Our Differences That Make Us The Same

It’s pretty true that other life sims have struggled to move past the whole “farming” thing. Even games that are supposedly about other aspects of life have a horrible tendency to throw in a small amount of farming “just in case.” This is part of the reason why so many life sim games have a tendency to feel the same, since all of them tend to throw in the same cycle of farming/mining/socialising, and at this point, it’s all been done before so many times that even the thought of trying to count them is actually putting me to sleep. 

Discounty handily avoids this issue by actually being about running a shop. There are no social mechanics (at least, you can’t throw chocolate at someone until they marry you), no farming, and no mining/monster hunting. Your focus is on running and improving your shop, and that’s all you really do. You go out to complete missions to make people like you more, but that’s to get more stock from other businesses; other than that, you spend your time collecting supplies, buying new furniture, and rearranging your store so it makes you as much money as possible. That’s it. 

You Should Run a Little Shop!

So, the base gameplay of Discounty revolved around the shop itself. Monday – Saturday, you have to arrive at the shop by 9 AM, or fear the wrath of your customers. As people move around the shop buying stuff, you have to restock everything from the back room, keep the floors clean to prevent clients from slowing down, and keep an eye on the till to make sure a huge queue isn’t forming. You also have to make sure that your shoppers are able to find everything and reach the till in a timely manner, something which heavily depends on the layout of your shop. 

As the manager of the store, you have to arrange all of your display furniture, consisting primarily of shelves, coolers, and boosters. The shelves and coolers are for displaying regular and frozen products, respectively, while the boosters will make certain item categories more appealing. It’s not good just shoving all of your goods around the place willy-nilly. If you don’t group your items by category, your customers will struggle to find them, and this is likely to have you receiving some negative feedback come closing time. You also need to make sure that the layout of your store doesn’t get too constricting, because these guys loooove to get hung up on shelves or counters. 

Bugs, Bugs, Gallons of the Stuff

As you could probably expect from any indie title, Discounty does have a few buggy moments. At least once, I had the text glitch out on my game, as well as experiencing story events slightly out of order in a way that left me a little confused. Both of these pale in comparison to the AI's tendency to get stuck in places, and then have a paddy at me for them being late with their shopping. 

When you’re working with pathfinding AI, it can be tough to get it perfect, and it’s certainly an example of something that needs tweaking in future versions of the game. You can avoid the problem by using specific layouts, to a degree, but after your final shop expansion, you get some non-optional furniture that seems to act like a people magnet. Most of the time, I could unstick people by spamming the (A) button on them, but once or twice, I just had to wait for the shop to close. 

The Good, The Great, and the Beautiful

My gripes aside, Discounty is still coming out of this thing with a huge recommendation. The artwork is beautiful, managing to give the game its own sense of personality rather than looking like 1000 other games on the market, and the sound design is also excellent. It got to a point when I was pretty addicted to hearing my till make the scanning ‘beep’, and was genuinely excited for my Sunday off, which would give me a chance to rearrange my store layout, and both the visuals and sounds have a huge part to play in that. 

The other key factor that makes this a success is the characters. Every person in the game, including the player character, is a distinct personality already, and your input on these people is limited. You don’t have choices to make really, beyond mostly choosing minor dialogue changes, and instead are invited to learn who these people are, why they feel the way they feel, and why most of them aren’t immediately what they appear to be upon your arrival.

Personally, I was hooked by these characters, and I didn’t miss any of the genre’s erstwhile mechanical tropes. Then the story came loaded with a level of nuance that I’ve not seen in games for a long time, and just blew me away. 

The Verdict

Discounty is a stellar example of an indie life sim that manages to avoid the traps that come from making a game in the heavily codified life simulation genre. While it has its issues here and there, the characters and storyline are a strong hook, and the gameplay of running your shop is unique yet just as addictive as any other experience of a similar ilk. With stunning visuals and sound thrown into the mix, this could easily become a firm favourite of genre fans, and I know that I’m not done with it despite having rolled the credits. It's gotta beat Tales from the Shire at any rate. 

Discounty was reviewed on PC with a copy provided by the developer over the course of 20 hours of gameplay - all screenshots were taken during the process of review.