Black Friday: The Ultimate Shopping Simulator Hands On — Sweep Store Shelves Clean for Profit

Whizzing around a shopping mall, pulling as many items as you can down onto the floor from the pallets and shelving — I’m sure you’ve all thought of doing this before.

In Black Friday: The Ultimate Shopping Simulator’s current form you are looking to knock everything off of the store’s perfectly lined shelves. You head into the store to trash everything — if it’s on the floor then you get to keep it! (Or as much of it as you can within a few minutes). Black Friday begins with you pulling the fire alarm from within the store, ensuring all of the customers and employees are outside. With the place all to yourself, you now have free reign to  utterly destroy it.

That’s basically what you are doing! Walking down each aisle with your hands out, knocking things off the shelves. You can also push your hands out and pull them back in, knocking more items off with the swiping action. Sometimes, the stuff you touch will end up moving along the shelf and staying there instead — this will not award you any points. The items that touch the floor, however, will be added up by price giving you the amount of damage you cause!

Smashing through stacks of toilet roll (cleverly named ‘Shit Paper’) may seem like a fun way to spend your time, but if you are like me, your goal is a high score. This means avoiding places like the produce area and going for expensive things: alcohol and diapers. Knocking these items off of their respective shelves will really bring up the total amount of damage you cause.

I was able to play a demo version of Black Friday: The Ultimate Shopping Simulator while I was at Bonus Stage, an event in london, where it won the ‘People’s Choice’ award. Speaking with the developer, Chel, they confirmed that they hope to include different types of store, each with different types of items within, and theming. It sounds like she had an electronic store in the pipeline, as an example.

In addition to this, the game’s current trailer shows two extra modes, one revolving clearing the mess from your rampage to the front of the store, and a final one where you need to knock items from a shopping list into your basket. Naturally, both look just as chaotic and fun as the main mode.

Destroying everything is quite the cathartic experience, so being able to do it in Black Friday: The Ultimate Shopping Simulator is perfect. If you’re interested in the development of this game, you should follow their Twitter, @BlackFridaySim or sign up for their newsletter on their website!