Welcome to my Supermarket Together store, Nice Groceries

I don’t have a lot going for me right now, but there’s one accomplishment I can proudly share: I’m the general manager at Nice Groceries, the newest supermarket where you can find everything you need for dinner, with specialties like unbanded rice, milk bricks, fruit yogurt, and a whole variety of sodas. What led me to such rich bounties? I discovered Supermarket Together, a free game on Steam that is catching on. “Grocery store simulator” doesn’t seem like a great sales pitch at first, but once I got a store going with my friends, we were all quietly enthralled. We divided ourselves into roles in an orderly fashion: I proudly stocked the shelves, my buddy Matt ordered products, and we had a rotating staff of friends on the cash register. The game’s design reminds me a lot of Lethal Company’s, except instead of worrying about sharp drops, murderous cryptids, or cursed masks, the worst thing we deal with is the dreadful shoplifter. Luckily, the game provides us with tools for a highly effective loss prevention department: brooms. If anyone tries any funny business, they get swarmed and thwomped repeatedly. Lately, I’ve been craving a chill gaming experience to share with friends -- something easy to pick up, flexible for co-op, and not requiring too much brain. While there are plenty of great games to enjoy with friends, like Stellaris, Helldivers 2, or Sea of Thieves, some of them are a little too involved, especially when people trickle home from work in a staggered sequence, or someone has to step away to deal with family or any of a million other interruptions. That said, it does seem like you can crank up the chaos in Supermarket Together; the game supports up to 16 players, and it scales up the difficulty with the number of people in the lobby. There’s also a separate difficulty meter, in case you want to play at a level that demands squads of broom-wielding shopkeepers roaming the supermarket grounds looking for thieves to pummel. Supermarket Together is available on Steam.