Aside from the fact that in general I haven’t been a fan of sims that have you roughly replicating the mundane tasks in certain industries or lines of work, I remain in awe at how many of them have come to the Switch in this generation. The thing is, while many of them are simply implemented so poorly they aren’t worth getting attention, there are those that work well enough and have managed to be just interesting enough through varied tasks or quirk that it hasn’t all been a waste. When I heard of a Supermarket Simulator, I’ll admit that it at least sounded a bit different, but playing the actual game it also didn’t work out quite as I expected.

Perhaps it would have been better called Mom & Pop Shop Simulator or Corner Store Simulator to better convey the size, or lack of it, in the space you’ll be working with. Humbly setting out from a simple store with a register, one set of shelves, and a very limited inventory, you won’t be running anything remotely super anytime soon… and if you do want to get there you’ll need to be ready to grind.

I think even as a more hands-off simulator, trying to grow from where you start here to anything remotely larger would be slow going, but when the simulation style has you manually walking around to pick up boxes, stock the shelves, and then even dispose of the boxes it’s a crawl. Add to that the fact that your rate of growth will relate directly to your ability to turn a profit and the pretty nitpicky aspect of managing your prices will come into play. As a warning, short of guaranteeing you’ll be out of business in a hurry, you’ll need to get thick-skinned about customers complaining about your prices. Even trying to find a reasonable balance, it felt the majority of my customers continued to roughly complain at the same rate, and without the game providing any real insights or guidance into how best to try to manage your store’s finance it will have to be a pure trial and error affair to find the track that works best.

What frustrates me most with this title is that it comes across as being too minimalist across the board. Whether it’s starting you out too small, providing you too little guidance and support, and feeling like it has definite limits to what you could hope to achieve, it honestly feels like it’s banking on you giving up before being forced to get too big and more complex. Yes, I tend to be tough on sim games of this kind in general, but moreso than most this just doesn’t seem to have any real path to fun or satisfaction since it doesn’t think big enough.