Shoppy Mart: Steam Edition is an unusual game, it's a job simulator, in this case, a checkout sales operator at a big chain grocery store. Gameplay, weirdly, is somewhat realistic as you swipe items across the barcode reader, weigh produce, punch in produce codes, and engage in the corporate mandated levels of small talk with the customers. In terms of game concepts, while perhaps a little soul destroying, it checks out (get it, checks out, checkout... see what I did there). I mean, if people go nuts over farm equipment simulators, why not this?
So, the game has every chance of finding a niche audience... and all these chances erode immediately when the godawfully poor quality implementation comes into the picture.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
The artwork here is terrible, it's a hodge-podge of amateurish "My First Wacom Tablet"/MS-Paint style drawings used instead professional looking game assets. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget to arrange someone who can create graphical assets properly, or lack of talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low, enough on its own to deter gamers.
While there are options to change the resolution for the game, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the game, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the lacklustre 2D visuals.
The developers didn't design the game for modern gaming PCs, as such the display resolution caps out at 1080p, a very low resolution that became mainstream back in 2006 and became obsolete when 4K entered the mainstream in 2014. The game simply won't look right on modern gaming displays due to this failure on the part of the developers.
Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the GameMaker Studio construction kit/toolset. This is a very poor quality toolset favoured by amateur developers as it's cheap and requires little in the way of development skill, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities. Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine. GameMaker Studio is most commonly used to make retro pixel shovelware and cash grabs.
A strong argument can be made that construction kits like GameMaker Studio should never be used to make games for profit, as the "developer", Pezomi has done here. These construction kits are intended to teach people some of the basic principles of game development, and to make small demos to pass around with friends. They're not intended to replace to actual work of real, professional game developers. So it's inappropriate when amateurs try to use these for profit, without any actual, real game development effort taking place. This doesn't result in products that have any real meaningful value for gamers.
The very poor quality of this game puts it squarely on-par with ancient 1990's Flash/Java games, and given it's 2023 (and this was released not so far back in 2015), gamers and the industry expect and deserve better than this kind of low effort shovelware.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
Shoppy Mart: Steam Edition didn't appeal much to the people who own a copy of the game, either. It has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game didn't really capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for scanning 10 items (you can do this with your first customer or so), trivial to get, but less than 37 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. Hardly a success story, gamers just weren't all that interested in the game.
Shoppy Mart: Steam Edition is relatively cheap at $2 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend.
Shoppy Mart: Steam Edition is the answer to the full grocery store cashier experience that many have dreamed about, and dozens asked for.