There is a woman trying to get into my supermarket. She’s banging on the sliding door glass, an urgent silhouette against swirling fog and darkness. My manager told me it’s not safe outside at night, but the woman doesn’t seem afraid, for all her banging. She is smiling. Not a nice smile. A Skibidi smile, all teeth and gums and painfully stretched skin.
I do not think I should let the woman in, but she explains to me in text dialogue that I have it all backwards. She’s not outside the store. I am. So really, if I let her in I’m only letting myself in. I do not find this gnomic insight reassuring. I tell her to clear off. She doesn’t press her case, but comments before drifting away that there might be consequences later. I silently observe that I would rather have consequences later than consequences right now.
This is Hellmart, a grubby first-person job simulator in which you spend your days stocking shelves, cleaning the aisles and manning the checkout, and your nights attempting to secure the premises against a nebulous Evil.
The daytime stretches are squalid and oppressive but relatively non-horrific. True, you might have to deal with paranormal antics such as self-slamming doors. True, the boxes of pasta on your shelves look vaguely like pictures of guts and eyeballs. True, the CCTV feeds on your computer by the till often reveal things that aren’t there, or which hopefully aren’t there. True, a lot of your customers sport that Skibidi smile, and true, it’s unclear where they’re from, exactly. The store sits in a waste of snow and forest, with locals emerging from behind a distant hill.
But that’s all peanuts compared to what happens when the sun sets. I haven’t progressed far enough to encounter some of the entities brazenly given away by the Steam page (and the below trailer), but it’s telling that you can board up windows. The security measures immediately feel inadequate. Being able to padlock the doors is of minimal comfort, given the presence of patently xenomorph-friendly airvents. The option to hide in fridges just feels like offering yourself up as a snack.
The store isn’t huge – it’s a handbaskets-only joint, barely roomy enough to justify the supermarket label, but the head-high shelves carve it up into a larger labyrinth that is pleasingly efficient in its jumpscare potential. And then there are the people [citation needed] who bang on the glass. Some of them are probably safe company: it’s up to you to decide, based on the things they say.
Watch on YouTube
There’s been a slight trend in horror games about Letting The Right One in over the past year or so. Mark recently wrote about No, I’m Not A Human, in which you are a post-apocalyptic hermit appraising the bona fides of night-time wanderers and Visitors. There’s also the earlier Look Outside, in which you definitely shouldn’t open the curtains, and the forthcoming Quarantine Zone, a chilly piece of military border policing that is hopefully alive to its own inhumanity.
It’s tempting to make connections with Covid lockdowns and lingering agoraphobia, but these are emotions that date back much further, of course – back through games like Papers, Please, Five Nights At Freddy’s and Darkwood to zombie fables about the possibly infected and folk legends about vampires and thresholds. The major difference I sense in games like Hellmart is that the monsters often don’t particularly bother to hide their monstrousness. The ghoulish thrill of these games is letting nocturnal callers cross the lintel even when you’re 70% sure they’re bad news, just to see what mayhem they wreak.
Find the Hellmart demo on Steam. I’ll conclude with the anecdote that I used to be a Tesco store cleaner, and the scariest thing that ever happened to me on-shift was two old ladies power-dunking jars of pesto and cream at either end of the store simultaneously – the janitorial equivalent of a Double Event in Pacific Rim. Mind you, now that I’ve played Hellmart, I realise how glad I am that I never had to lock up after dark. That Tesco was huge. So many sightlines. Pretty sure it had a meat locker as well.
It’s out “soon”. Bulgaria-based developers Gaze in Games are a new outfit founded by a former member of Zoochosis developers Clapperheads. If you’re sold on the premise and don’t want to wait, there’s also the lower-fi Kiosk from Serbian developer Vivi.
