Campsite Hustle! Review (PC)

Red Shore Valley serves as an invitation to dial it back to a simpler time—to an era where pleasantries were built on outstanding natural beauty and campfire talk, melodic tweets and the bare necessities. Outside, in a wood that actively shunned electronics and embraced ambiance, peace and harmony were the currencies that ferried the upkeep of a local campground. In an ideal world, Campsite Hustle! yearns to cradle that idyllic spirit, not as a run-of-the-mill business sim, but as a hearty reminder that the great outdoors has a lot more to offer than toasted s’mores.

A shopkeeping sim at heart, Campsite Hustle! works to capture the essence of the world that hangs outside of our window. As the keeper of the checkouts, the facilities, and the little touches that make a campsite stand out as the perfect getaway destination for local vacationers, you find yourself with the opportunity to shape the grounds, the atmosphere, and the camping experience, not as a full-time shopkeeper, but as the puppeteer who has the luxury of being able to tailor the itinerary. Well, to an extent.

While most of the game takes place within the store—a building that you yourself can stock, manage, and maintain with the aid of your colleagues—Campsite Hustle! offers you the chance to explore various facets of camping. For example, you can erect facilities, build well-stocked vending machines, repair damages, and, on occasion, chase mischievous raccoons with a bat. What’s more, you can weave well-oiled agendas to hand to your staff, orchestrate operations, and create a variety of activities for your guests. The list goes on, naturally. For the most part, though, the beating heart idles within the store itself, thus making Campsite Hustle! a familiar shopkeeping sim with a twist.

If you’re not stacking shelves and accepting payments at the store, then you’re out exploring opportunities to enhance your camping spot. With various upgrades to unlock and a handful of maintenance tasks to juggle, the game offers you a good way to splurge your time. The shopkeeping experience, for example, as familiar as it may seem to the casual business sim enthusiast, allows you to stockpile theme-appropriate items, serve customers, and tend to all of the slippery issues that transform an otherwise healthy business into a chaotic one-stop shop for campsite luxuries. But to be honest, that’s just one of the duties that you take on here. And frankly, I’m over the moon about that, given that the genre currently has thousands of titles that orbit the same generic features that, to be fair, don’t add a lot of originality to the general framework.

Don’t get me wrong, you still have a familiar business sim with a lot of the same basic trappings here, and one that continues to lean on a lot of the same generic nodes as a traditional business sim à la Supermarket Simulator. That being said, with a little extra weight in its gameplay department, it does stand out as a bigger, better, and more inclusive experience. To that end, you won’t struggle to find a charming game here. A familiar one, sure, but one that also bears its own hallmark qualities. Chasing wild animals with a bat is a prime example, really.

Thankfully, Campsite Hustle! has a good amount of customizable components to work with. Aside from the fact that you can tailor the curriculum and manage your staff and their responsibilities, there’s also an opportunity for you to erect signs, design logos, and transform barren plots into booming hubs for guests to congregate in. What’s more, the game provides a lot of challenges for you to overcome, including saboteurs who frequent your campsite to wreak havoc, animals that actively seek to trash your pristine habitat, and a whole host of vending machines and facilities that suffer from frequent technical and teething problems.

While the game does often require you to juggle a lot of balls simultaneously, at no point does it ever make the act of running a campsite feel like a daunting task. On the contrary, it often feels like a rewarding job that has just as many perks as it does challenges. At first, it can be rather difficult to wrap your head around the basics. But, like all things, after spending enough time behind the counter and watching the world unfold and the upgrades weave into a well-oiled machine, the duties begin to align with your goals and the process of maintaining the business begins to feel like second nature.

All in all there’s a pleasant surprise here that any fan of cozy business simulation games will likely enjoy spending a handful of hours unpacking. It might not boast a brilliant plot or anything that’s even remotely character-driven, but to give credit where it’s due, it does offer a clean and wholesome experience that is both inviting and satisfying to build on. The visuals are as equally vibrant as they are coherent, and the animation is smooth enough to keep you immersed for the long haul. Again, it might not go much further than a traditional shopkeeping sim, though it does take full advantage of its setting to incorporate a ton of creatively apt ideas that befit the campfire theme.

Verdict

Campsite Hustle! brings the perfect summer vacation to your front door with the company of a sun-soaked smile. Even with a lot of familiar shopkeeping tropes and seemingly generic gameplay elements to carry its charm, it still manages to find a good balance between being a busy experience and a highly entertaining one. It’s all in the title though, so a little hard work is to be expected here, to be fair. Nobody said that the act of managing a campsite would be a walk in the park. But a rewarding job, on the other hand, it most definitely is, provided that the raccoons are out of the picture, of course.

With all of the above out in the open, I’d say that there is a good amount here to help you cater to that itch. It might not be a flawless business-shopkeeping sim, but it is one that should be able to keep you engaged for a handful of hours or more. Perhaps that’s a small price to pay for the gift of serenity.