You're Kazio, an ex-coal miner, husband, father, and the newest cashier at Żopka, the iconic neighbourhood convenience store chain. Your job is simple: serve the customers, follow the rules, don't get fired. The real challenge is harder: keep a family fed on a cashier's wage.
WORK THE REGISTER.
Scan stock from a catalogue of 800+ products across 24 categories, check documents, grill hot dogs, count out change down to the last grosz. Easy enough, until corporate starts piling on regulations. Suddenly you're enforcing the age limit on energy drinks, validating coupons and loyalty cards, charging for the plastic bag and catching expired student IDs. The queue grows, the clock runs down...
And the customers don't make it any easier. Over 100 unique characters: from smooth-talking businessmen and dealers offering a bribe, through impatient Karens, tracksuit philosophers paying in loose change and shoplifters, to a mohair-bereted grandma, a suspiciously large proboscis monkey and the winos camped outside the door. Every one of them there to test your patience.
WORK THE SYSTEM.
Your mother needs surgery, your son needs money for a school trip, winter is coming and the heating bill doubles. After each shift you take home whatever you earned and split it five ways: rent, food, medicine, school, heating.
...Or invest the profit back into the store, as befits a "co-owner". You start in the Shanty: a flickering fluorescent tube, wire shelving, cracked linoleum and 60 slots for stock. The shelves empty out mid-shift and the delivery rolls in right in the middle of the queue. The catalogue holds 40 upgrades, but only 24 fit in one store, and every level is a choice between two variants that change the way you play. At the end of the road stands the gleaming, neon-lit Cyber-Żopka with 140 shelf slots, the one corporate would be proud of.
CHECK THE DATE.
Six holidays, 85 days a year: on Fat Thursday the doughnuts are laid out on the counter, at Easter a butter lamb stands there instead, on the first of November grave candles burn in the window and customers you haven't seen here in a very long time drop in, and on New Year's Eve the sky above the estate lights up. Every holiday means 24 seasonal products on the shelves, its own interior decorations and a dressed-up main menu.
AND MAKE IT WORK WELL.
Accept the bribe or report it. Join the union or stay loyal. Save up for your mother's surgery or for a new counter. Over 30 days your decisions add up to one of 9 endings: some hopeful, some devastating, and one that crowns you emperor of Żopka. Each unlocks its own New Game Plus bonus, and the full set of nine earns you a tenth.
The ending isn't the end. Żopka Forever starts on day 31, no story and no finish line, with Steam leaderboards. I'm Hardcore switches on every regulation from day one and never lets you buy your way out of a citation. And two completely different stores are waiting in the menu: 1670 and 2077, each with its own stock, its own cast and its own rules. In 1670 you sell oscypek cheese, starka and Capuchin friars' tobacco, and the freshest press on the counter is Merkuriusz Polski. Nobody orders a hot dog, because there is nothing yet to make one out of. In 2077 Żopka glows with neon, bread comes out of a printer, the kabanos is synthetic, and you never give change, because nobody here pays cash any more.
WHAT'S IN THE BOX
A 30-day story campaign, from tutorial calm to full bureaucratic panic
15 policies piled on along the way, each one another chance to screw something up
800+ products across 24 categories, from oscypek cheese to bootleg DVDs, including over 100 regional specialities
Document checks: six types, swapped photos, fake PESEL numbers and the legendary Bolsat Passport
A budget system where every złoty makes a difference
Three mini-games woven into the shift: counting out change, the grill and sorting parcels at the Paczkobox
40 store upgrades, 24 of them per playthrough, because every level is a choice between two
Over 100 unique characters, from Karens and tracksuit philosophers to a proboscis monkey
Six holidays from the real calendar, almost half a thousand seasonal products
Two extra game modes, 1670 and 2077: different rules, different products, different customers
9 endings, each with a New Game Plus bonus, plus Żopka Forever and I'm Hardcore
125 items to find, 130 clickable nooks and crannies and 18 random events
Steam leaderboards and 69 achievements
Full gamepad support
Translations into regional languages: Silesian, Kashubian, Poznań dialect
