Played the demo while watching a YouTube video about it. After 10 minutes I thought why watch this when I could be playing it. I do not enjoy the shopkeeper simulation genre but this game had the zombie apocalypse theme and enough combat to make it interesting. The beginning was crazy hectic because I kept the store open all day every day instead of closing it to clean up. It was too much for 1 person to serve customers, fight Zs, loot and dispose of bodies, and sort the loot. So the place was a mess. Customers kept dying, many of which were killed by me because of how stupid they were. New customers trailing Zs into the store and cutting in front of me just as I swung, or old customers walking in front of me during combat. I even went to 0 hp once because all the dead bodies attracted too many Zs. I got lucky with a very early crowbar though forget if it was from the kid scavenging or dropped by a killed customer, but I did not open the back until I had enough xp to unlock hiring a cashier. With a 2nd hire handling all the sales I actually had enough time to keep on top of fighting, looting and corpse disposal, including looting the outside. The best way to fight was to exit the store upon hearing Zs and approach from behind with a single strike. Hitting any Z once made them all focus on me and then I could move them away from the door to prevent those friendly fire mishaps. Then I got into the back and learned how to make new shelves, so I filled the walls with them, even sending the kid into town to buy more planks. I actually lowered the price slightly on worn cloth to 3 and kept unlabeled food at 3 but should have upped them to 5 each. Everything else I marked up 20%, even 30% for rare items. I was throwing stuff on the shelves randomly, including just dropping stuff on top of other stuff and hoping the physics made it stay but it did seem to affect sales. I often seen customers stare at the ridiculous mess on the shelves for several seconds before going to a different shelf to just buy crappy cloth. So I decided to dedicate each shelf to 1 product and only put items on properly. This helped a lot and I finally seen weapons getting sold regularly. I eventually unlocked the hospital and supermarket to scavenge after sending 2 staff to clear the horde, even getting a fancy free standing shelf unit. I barely did any crafting. Tape + pipes made a better weapon but didn't seem worth it. Beer + cloth made 3 bandages but I was already getting them from the hospital. Moldy bread + wine made antibiotics but I only had that bread once. I made the starter kid security to try it out. They could not friendly fire so they were quite effective at keeping customers alive but tended to die if there was more than 1 zombie. I was shocked when the kid died because I thought he was a special character, but the kid model was one of the standard workers. I think I would rather handle the security but you would definitely need 2 or 3 guards to do any kind of afk play. I also did 2 raids. For the 1st I closed the store and luckily had just acquired a pistol for the exploding Zs but it seemed like the last wave did not spawn. Next raid I left the store open and had no problems. The 3rd wave had a tough giant Z that hit hard but I still killed it purely in melee.

I broke 2 crowbars during my play and was using a spiked plank when I stopped. Weapons dropped by customers sold for nothing (it said customer wants to buy 0x weapon for 0) so I stashed them all in the bedroom for personal use. Customers sometimes bought stuff that was on the floor, even pulling stuff out of nowhere that I assume must have been lost in the floor or walls. Early on 1 tried to buy a plank and another bought a baseball bat that was dropped by a customer that I never even moved. I was getting annoyed towards the end because I was accumulating stuff faster than it was selling. Other than rare stuff like pistols, ammo and first aid kits. I had massive piles of canned food, beer, rope, scrap metal and cloth. There were not enough customers and they only bought 1 thing so there was never a concern about running out of stuff to sell. An upgrade said it gave a chance for customers to buy multiple things but I never noticed. I wanted to see the shelves go bare and have to work at obtaining stock to avoid ruined reputation but instead the process felt pointless with no stakes. Customers should be able to buy as much as they want, even a single person cleaning the entire store out if prices were low enough. Like how I had cloth going for slightly under value they should have been buying it by the cart load. There was a game breaking bug where the Zs and myself failed to take damage but I still got xp from hitting them, and the performance took a huge hit. I fixed it by sleeping then exiting to menu because the game only saved in the mornings. I hated how left click was for both search and pick up bodies and I could not figure out what context made the command change. It made dealing with corpses needlessly annoying, and they were already finicky to grab and beholden to weird physics. I did not like how some people sold stuff to the store and the cashiers automatically accepted it. There should be programmable rules for what to buy. There was a bug where if the cashier got off shift during a transaction then I was not able to complete it and the only solution was to close the store. Easily fixed by not letting the cashier get off until the current customer is completed.

This will be a cool game but it does need improvement. Doubt I would buy it since I'd rather be doing the scavenging than running the shop