So Scott Cawthon figured out a while ago that management and horror go together like peanut butter and jam. He also, maybe unexpectedly at first, nailed the perfect youtuber game: a game that gets great reactions from youtubers; has the perfect lore breadcrumbs to spawn a decade of theory crafting; and it’s all wrapped up in a novel concept. Hellmart feels like the logical progression of that recipe. The basic management of checking cameras in earlier FNAFs here take the shape of a fully fledged supermarket simulator much like the kinds of profession/job-simulators that have become popular over the last few years (not least among youtubers and streamers). The question is of course whether a grocery store simulation is a good foundation for engaging horror? For the most part, yes.

Hellmart’s central conceit is that you need to work for seven days at a bizarre grocery store in a remote town. By day you run the store with the goal of meeting your daily sales quota and by night you keep out monsters, chase away anomalies, and carefully select who you allow into the safety of the store. The tasks of each phase escalate as the days go on, too. The quantity and variety of stock increases each day as does the sales quota. At night the various supernatural invasion attempts become more aggressive and harder to stop. While it was never super challenging – I only ever missed the quota once – it does remain engaging in no small part because of the frights that punctuate all parts of the game. 

It would be easy for a youtuber-fodder game like Hellmart to fall back on clichés and cheap scares and while it has a few low-brow spooks like creepy smiles and jumpscares, the game offers a surprising amount of variety and creativity in its scares and how they’re delivered. A customer will ask you to grab a cigarette from the shelf behind you, and when you turn back around you may be startled by a ghoul at the counter. You might be bringing in stock from outside only to see a creep peeking out from behind a door. You may even be greeted by a Karen who, once allowed entry, turns into a 10 foot long demon beast. Many of these are one-and-done, too, which along with the game’s short length (it took me no longer than three hours to reach an ending) means it never feels stretched thin or padded with filler. It would be rather hard to take scary supermarket seriously as a setting, so all of this horror is delivered with a kind of tongue-in-cheek overall presentation that feels a bit like Evil Dead 2. The little grunts and “nu uh” from the player character were especially funny to me. This particular tone is handled skilfully enough that bits of self-awareness or humour never sacrificed the game’s capacity to make me jump.

Gameplay wise Hellmart’s essential core is the busywork characteristic of any of the more traditional management or simulator games. You stack shelves, count out change, and mop floors when they get dirty. At night these tasks are swapped for less mundane ones including rebuffing anomalies and axing creature hands with the occasional decision of whether or not to let someone into the store (while remembering the all-important rule to not let him in). Unfortunately, while it’s the perfect frame around which to create scares, the actual simulation bits don’t feel super well developed. Stock management isn’t exactly challenging when your stock room is automatically filled each morning and you have seemingly infinite time to stock shelves before opening each day. Upgrades to things like the generator or shelf space were seemingly completely unnecessary because I made it through to the good ending with the base version of each. Most of these mechanics aren’t terrible, but the game doesn’t get all the juice out of them. There are also strange dead ends like the cameras which are used for one scare and otherwise unimportant or the shotgun and beartraps which are perpetually out of stock in the shop. The shortcomings of the mechanics may not phase you, though, if what you’re looking for are scares first and foremost.

While the gameplay could certainly be stronger it never in itself becomes dull and is surrounded by so much creatively enthusiastic horror that it’s hard to not have a good time with Hellmart. It’s not the best looking game by a long shot, nor was it the best running for me (frame dips when entering and exiting the store were a problem) but these issues likewise never inhibit the game’s mission of administering frights. Overall, Hellmart feels like a great low-budget effort from an indie team with heart and, crucially, real talent when it comes to crafting a horror experience. I was thoroughly entertained by Hellmart and look forward to whatever Gaze in Games puts out next. 7/10