If challenged to design a game set in a supermarket, you might settle on a shelf-stacking puzzle game in which you slot Tetris-shaped products into appropriately sized gaps. Or, perhaps, like the TV gameshow, a timed dash-and-grab along the aisles in which you must amass the highest value trolley. It’s unlikely, however, that you’d arrive at Supermarket Times, a surrealist point-and-click adventure with the hand-drawn aesthetic of a 10-year-old child’s felt-tip art project and a sense of humour lifted from The Young Ones (the supermarket’s toilet paper is branded Cloud Arse).
There are few comparison points to this, the second game from the art-school dropouts behind indie studio Rabbit Hole Games. You explore the various districts of the supermarket – the freezer aisle; the mobile phone area, complete with zitty, over-knowledgable sales assistant; the cigarette booth; the recycling area; the forsaken bathrooms – interacting with staff and customers. You’re free to fill your trolley with whatever takes your fancy, while listening to the observations of two omniscient commentators whose remarks include surprisingly informative descriptions of mushrooms, and ironic takes on expensive fruit juices.
As you fill out the site map, you encounter various bizarre minigames too. In one, for example, you choose the velocity at which you slap a side of meat hanging in the butchery, while the narrator issues off-puttingly lewd barks of encouragement.
There are objectives too: strike a passing gull with a rock; find a way to open a stuck pickle jar; buy alcohol for the teenagers loitering outside; recycle the discarded bottles and cans that litter the first floor. By solving these puzzles you arrive at a grander resolution, after the supermarket reveals its hidden depths and secret dimensions. Can you find a way to appease the goblin that lives in the freezer? Can you exorcise the haunted toilet? It’s a delightfully silly journey, and a rare example of a truly iconoclastic video game emerging from a sea of derivatives.
