Supermarket Times review – surrealist adventure in a store of secrets

Rabbit Hole Games; PC, Mac
On this delightfully silly journey your challenge is to explore the supermarket aisles, meet the staff – and freezer goblin – and buy alcohol for teenage loiterers. Cheers!

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.