Liquor Store Simulator Review (PC)

If you’ve ever dreamed of shipping your own licensed decanters, coconut liqueurs, spiced rums, and barrels of fresh highland bourbon, then I have some good news: Liquor Store Simulator has just this moment dropped on Steam, and it has brought its own cask of business simulation tropes to the counter for fledgling connoisseurs to sample. That’s right, you might as well forget the blueberries and fabric conditioner that you bought for Supermarket Simulator, and dig your hooks into this business endeavor, for the flasks are frothing at the brim with opportunities to explore and customers to absolve of their undying thirst. Well, something like that.

The good news is, you don’t need to be graduate of any major university to understand how to stock shelves and serve mojitos to a train conductor. Like a lot of shopkeeping simulation games, the objective is ridiculously simple: build a store, stock your favorite alcohol, and serve frequent customers to earn a basic wage. And as for the rest of the experience, well, let’s just say that you don’t need the gift of clairvoyance to understand how it works. The cash rolls in, and the upgrades, be they purely cosmetic or financially beneficial to the business, begin to unfold. And that’s really all you have here: a circle-of-life, almost rags-to-riches journey that centers its entire existence around beverages and hard liquor.

So, is Liquor Store Simulator worth the time and effort? If you’re interested in hearing more about it, then go ahead and pour a glass of wine and let us supply the bottle.

One For the Road

Liquor Store Simulator more or less follows that same yellow brick road as its peers. In a nutshell, it looks like the exact same vessel; it has the usual gimmicks of a business simulation game, the familiar incentives, and even the wooden personalities, to boot. But, there’s a difference here: the experience isn’t tailored toward groceries or flipping real estate, but whiskeys and beer, bourbon and gin. Aside from the switchover of products, however, the game itself essentially roles out in a similar fashion, with the introduction mostly focusing on laying the foundations for a liquor store, and feeding you small nuggets of information as you gradually transform the liminal space into a bustling hub for alcoholic beverages.

It starts out with the absolute basics—a small shop, a pocket-sized selection of generic bottles, and a fickle promise that, if you earn enough money over the first several shifts, you might just be able to elevate the business to exceed even grander heights. There’s a lot to upgrade over the duration of your career, too, with various shelving units, prominent brands, capable staff members, and a surprisingly lofty skill tree all playing a part in the ascension process. But, like a huge portion of slow-burning simulation games, a lot of these things aren’t necessarily available to collect in the first several hours or so. Not that this comes as a major surprise, mind you, given that Liquor Store Simulator falls into that perpetual cycle of supplementing genuine milestones for breadcrumbs.

On the Rocks

To say that Liquor Store Simulator is teeming with exciting things for you to do wouldn’t be an accurate statement. No, if anything, the core gameplay loop is incredibly dull compared to your traditional bullet-brazen RPG. But that’s hardly a surprise, given that it wears its heart on its sleeve and makes it abundantly clear right from the get-go that, in order to progress, you will need to bite your tongue and roll through the motions, even if it means having to witness minuscule changes over time. You receive shipments, stock the shelves, sell items, and slowly channel your income into purchasing new things—champagne, cocktail mixers, nibbles, and basic structural upgrades that help to expand the store and foster higher quality products and what have you. This is all textbook stuff, and so, if you’re somewhat familiar with the genre, then you won’t need a helping hand here.

The gameplay itself isn’t the problem here; it’s the fact that, in spite of its best efforts to sever ties with its chosen forefather, it still falls under that exact same umbrella of copy-and-paste budget simulators. This isn’t a bad thing, per se, but it doesn’t exactly do much to prevent itself from succumbing to the same tropes, either.

Verdict

Liquor Store Simulator falls into that same dime-a-dozen business simulation category that, like yeast extract, you will either love or hate, depending on your taste in entertainment, as well as what you would consider worthy of your palate. Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t offer a great deal more than the traditional shopkeeping simulator, what with the lion’s share of the experience mostly revolving around the usual nine-to-five duties—stocking shelves, ordering items, and serving customers, for example. That said, with a fairly decent amount of liquors to ship, upgrades to invest in, and an easygoing progression system that gives just as much as it takes, I can see how one might be able to spend a few hours fluctuating between the various cycles here.

While it’s certainly no secret that shopkeeping games are an acquired taste, it does seem that the more jobs and trades that come along, the more popular these pockets of retail-centric worlds are becoming. At this point, you wouldn’t struggle to find a chore core sim that aligns with your best interests, be it a funeral service, power washing, or lawn maintenance. Here, you should find just about everything you expect from a liquor simulation IP: kiosks, casks, and an influx of visitors who lack emotion and any sense of purpose other than to consume alcohol on a daily basis. It doesn’t stretch much further than that, I’ll admit, so if it’s depth that you want, then I don’t know what to tell you. Tough luck, basically.

Of course, if you enjoy the process of building a store and fleshing it out with the occasional upgrade, then you won’t find any shortage of things to keep you busy here. As for how long you are likely to stay in this line of work is another question altogether.