Supermarket Shriek Preview

This will be a quickie (that’s what [pronoun] said) for Supermarket Shriek as the demo, sadly no longer available as the Steam Festival has finished, is super quick.

It must have been over a year or more when I first saw this title, but as an Xbox title, never got to play it. Well, it’s coming to Steam now, and I had a go with the demo. Twice.

The first time was to entertain the kids as they were a bit restless, so showed them some new games. After showing them how to play it, it looked like a super simple concept, but crazy to get right. After a few laughs at the screams and subsequent deaths, we moved on to the next.

Supermarket Shriek Preview

Doing a bit of housekeeping, I went through my Steam list and realised that I hadn’t played the game on my own. Picking up the controller and calibrating the left and right triggers to the tones of the goat and his sidekick, the human, I was good to go.

There’s no explanation for this predicament other than a chap minding his own business when a shopping trolley and goat collide with him. Rather than get out, they both remain and decide to do a shop crawl; that is, visit every retail store in sight and doing a supermarket sweep in the fastest time.

With the left trigger, you control the screams of the man, and this moves you in one direction, the right trigger controls the goat to head the other way. In unison, you go in a straight line. Easy. It’s a bit like a rowing a boat though as you hold just one of the buttons, you go in a circle.

Putting aside the tricky yet straightforward mechanics, you then have to get through an assault course on par with Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout, only you’re steering a trolley, and the moment you collide with a spinning blade or fall or a make-do bridge, you end your run.

When you do manage to get through the course, you’ll receive a rating out of three stars with an indication of what time you need to unlock more. After a questionable run, I managed to get three stars with ‘a new record’ only to be placed 200 and something on the global leaderboard, the top score being almost a third of my total time.

In The Supermarket, Everyone Can Hear You Scream

Supermarket Shriek, from Billy Goat Entertainment and PQube, is fiercely competitive in that it resembles a shoot ’em up where you’re aiming to get the highest score, only here it’s the time. In terms of presentation, it’s great. I love the devious traps throughout the courses and character modelling.

I would have liked the screaming to have been a bit more over-the-top, but appreciate hearing one, if not both characters, screaming constantly will grate. It works, that’s the main thing.

So yes, a short write-up as there were only a few courses to complete. Despite my reservations that Supermarket Shriek is hard, it’s not that bad, but if you want to rank highly, then you’ll either have to put in the time or just be blessed with awesome hand-eye-coordination.

Supermarket Shriek is out on the 23rd of October on Steam – wishlist it from the following link to Steam.