When I first saw Thrifty Business at New Game Plus, I was instantly interested in playing. It was bright, colorful, and had a fantastic cozy vibe to it all. This game is all about running your own thrift shop; stocking items, listening to locals, expanding. It’s sort of freeform, with lots of fun styles!
The story in Thrifty Business, as you might have guessed, has you taking over an old thrift shop. From there you instantly start purchasing items to stock through an app, which operates similar to gacha/blind-boxes, where you are able to see some words that hint at the vibes of the items — or, if you’re lucky, literally list some of the included items. But, these boxes often have far more in them. Sometimes they fit the tags and sometimes there are surprises!
You then unpack the items onto shelves, tables and clothing racks. Some items need to have a specific type of display, like clothing on racks and larger items on tables rather than shelves. Effective selling in Thrifty Business comes from when you successfully group together items that have the same vibes to them, but in the early game I often found myself simply trying to fit in as much stuff as possible in each and every space that I could. Once I’d expanded my store though, that’s when themed rooms started happening, and it felt great.
You see, you can gain points that unlock different themes for laying out your store. These points are gained from having social interactions with, and getting to know, your customers. Once you’ve gathered enough of them you can then upgrade different punch cards to unlock related themes; ‘The 90s Arcade’ and ‘The Witchy one’ were two of my favourites. I then used these specific themes to decorate rooms that I had purchased as expansions, and then started putting appropriately tagged items in the rooms that I had designed. There is a lot of freedom in how you organise and what you do, and there’s no obligation to theme rooms. On that note, though, there are also plenty of decorations to make your shop look nicer too.
You recieve a small report at the start of each of Thifty Business‘ days which states the vibes of your shop and how well you’ve decoratedl. Through running community events on your calendar, there will be days where specific vibes resonante better with your audience and subsequently sold more. For example, on book club meeting days, books sell better.
To unlock the ability to run these events, you’ll need to follow the story. Specific community members will often ask for an item they need; camera lenses, air fryers, a really cool jumper. You will then need to deduce the vibe that these items would have and try to get a box with relevant items in and then stock it to progress their individual story. Sometimes regulars are also selling boxes to you that add to their story. Everyone has something going on; within long you’ll have someone learning baking and someone looking to date, and another person who recently got a puppy. Often, when they shop, they will talk to you and you can choose how to respond, earning upgrade points for your shop.
You can expand a lot in Thrifty Business, adding more and more floors to your shop. People will explore far down, often taking the stairs or elevators. I find it all to be very fun! I especially enjoyed the casual bits of story and the pacing of everything, with progression, events and unlocks all coming at a pleasant pace. Over time, new items with new vibes come up too — I found it especially funny that I got to buy a box of cursed things.
Thrifty Business is a casual, fun management game with a lot of love put into it. It feels extremely distinct too. The number of items is MASSIVE with so many different categories for them — it feels like the amount of personal touch that you can put into your shop is limitless. The only real negative is how many wallpaper patches I needed to purchase to change over the look of a room (one for each side, with the stairs being it’s own ‘side), but this is a very small detail to hold back as a negative.
Thrifty Business is out soon on Steam.
