I played four hours of Supermarket Simulator last night. Its biggest surprise was how quickly it returned me to the same dulled emotional state I lived in when I worked a retail job in real life.
Supermarket Simulator is a new job sim from Nokta Games that has proven very popular on Twitch. I decided to give it a go because job sims are something of a personal curiosity. I’m fascinated by the way they take the mundanity of day-to-day work and carve out a (often very repetitive) game loop.
But I’ve never played a job sim that caused a level of emotional regression that would make my therapist frown with concern. An unexpected nightmare item in the mental bagging area, if you will.
Supermarket Simulator works the way most games in this genre do: you start with basically nothing — a small store, a cash register, some bare shelves, a small amount of money, and a computer you can use to purchase your first day’s worth of stock. Your stock is delivered instantly, and the boxes are left outside the store for you to retrieve. Your character comes in at 8 AM, puts in their orders for the day, and then opens the cardboard boxes they arrive in. The stock in those boxes goes on the shelf. You check all the shelves for price changes, and your computer will alert you to market fluctuations on specific products to help you juice your profits. Once the shelves are filled, you open the doors, take your place behind the checkout counter, and your 12-hour workday begins.
Each day follows a predictable ebb and flow. A handful of early risers wander through in the morning for cereal, coffee and tea. As the day wears on, people will come through to pick up odds and ends in varying quantities. From about 5 PM onwards, the after-work rush begins, with people picking up items for dinner on their way home. Finally, at the end of the day, you’ll get two or three late arrivals that stroll in right at 9 PM, keeping you at the register well after you were supposed to knock off.
The realism, particularly on that last point, is incredible. Anyone who’s worked in retail will tell you about the people who arrive minutes too late and beg to be let into the store. “I know what I want! I can grab it right now,” they all say. The shelf filling and late customers loosened the emotional boulder, but it was the register jockey work that sent it rolling down the hill.
In real life, serving customers is a mechanical process. Saying hello when they approach the counter, scanning everything quickly, tallying up the total, taking their money, and sending them on their way becomes something you can do in your sleep. Indeed, retail workers who’ve been in the trenches over Christmas frequently do do it in their sleep, dreaming about being back at work and then waking up and having to do it again for real. In Supermarket Simulator, it’s even more mechanical. What began with my mind compulsively responding to each new customer (“How’d you go? Just <price> today. On the card? When you’re ready. See you next time.”) and creating stories in my head about their lives based on the things they bought quickly devolved into silent mouse clicking. I could feel the light in my eyes dying with every transaction. I was fast on the register. Ruthlessly efficient. But I was once again hollow inside. I don’t remember the customers’ faces. I got flashes of their clothes, swiftly forgotten. The imaginative spark of drafting a profile based on dress and grocery preference was extinguished.
It was 10 PM by the time a need to use the loo finally broke the game’s horrible spell over me. I closed the game, made a cup of tea, went outside and looked up the stars. I couldn’t believe how quickly I’d fallen back into old habits, the old mental state devoid of thought and care. I don’t know if I should describe this response as a mark of the game’s quality or accuracy. Rather, I think it’s a mark of how badly the scars of almost a decade in retail affect me to this day. I thought that, in leaving retail for a different field, maybe I could leave the very specific traumas of life in that industry and the ego death that goes with it, behind. Turns out they’re all still there, just below the surface, and all it took was a clunkily made job sim to bring them out.
Congratulations to the team at Nokta, you shipped a fine product. If its all the same to you, I don’t think I’ll be playing it again.
Supermarket Simulator is on Steam for PC and the Play Store for Android devices.
Image: Nokta Games, Kotaku Australia
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