In 2024, we witnessed the rise of the retail sim: games like Supermarket Simulator, Supermarket Together, and TCG Card Shop Simulator that lured players, streamers, and YouTubers with the unparalleled power fantasy of putting stuff on shelves. While the genre’s overnight emergence was surprising, its success makes sense. There’s joy to be found in mundane retail work when your real-life livelihood doesn’t depend on enduring its regular horrors.
While surveying the top demos of this month’s Next Fest, however, I couldn’t help but notice that there’s a sudden rash of upcoming games all intent on making simulated retail work worse. By my count, there are currently at least four different games in development about operating convenience stores while surviving—or in some cases, facilitating—a variety of interplanetary, unholy, and undead terrors.
I can’t explain how it happened, but there’s clearly something pinging around the collective noosphere that made a bunch of dev teams decide all at once that “gas stations, but bad” was a space that needed exploring.
Getting the most attention of the bunch is Roadside Research, one of this Next Fest’s most played demos. In it, players do the shelf stocking, change exchanging, and gas pumping you’d expect—but they’re doing it as poorly disguised aliens using the gas station as cover for a research outpost for surveilling (and presumably probing) humanity ahead of a full-scale invasion effort.
Then there’s Hellmart, in which you’re the lone operator of a 24-hour convenience store “in the far North.” Your patrons all have eerie, toothy grins, shadowy man-shapes will sometimes linger menacingly outside the windows, and at night you have to board up the building while battling throughout the aisles against a fleshy horror with meters-long limbs. Worth noting that a few Hellmart demo reviewers say its pre-rendered, first person trailer is a far cry from how the game actually plays, though.
The Walking Trade takes the shop sim concept and sets it in an undead apocalypse, although one that’s not so bad that it’s destroyed the notion of commerce. Shelves are stocked with supplies and weaponry for fellow survivors, and profits will build the necessary defenses for outlasting the occasional zombie horde. But even in an undead outbreak, you still have to take the garbage out. Nobody likes shopping in a dirty store.
Shift At Midnight adds a different sort of simulation to the mix: While serving gas station customers, you’ll have to examine their behavior and identification to decide whether they’re who they say they are—or if they’re a predatory doppelganger like something out of The Thing. Failing to identify a doppelganger turns the gas station into a shootout with a rampaging mass of raw body horror. It does make me wonder why they’re bothering to pretend to buy milk, though.
And if you’re willing to stray farther from retail sim conventions, there are still more dire convenience stores on offer.
Set in its own undead nightmare, Service with a Shotgun splits the difference between retail customer service, virtual novel storytelling, and a first person wave defense shooter. [Herror] Gas Station Case is an upcoming gas station-centric entry in an ongoing horror walking sim anthology. Before Exit: Gas Station, which released earlier this month, is an “anomaly detection game” where you toil beneath the omnipotent gaze of your towering, bald overlord in pursuit of promotion? I’m not as clear on what’s up with this one, but I know I’m unsettled.
It’s only natural for subgenres to emerge from popular trends, but why this specific one and why all at once? Is it sublimated resentment about gas prices? Anxiety over grocery inflation? Or was there simply a general realization that going from grocery store sim to haunted gas station is a pretty short design leap?
Hard to say. I’ll be interested to see what the retail sim warps into next, though. Mahjong parlor simulators, maybe?
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