Co-Open Review: Minimarket Sweep

How did it come to this, you might ask?

Co-Open is another Humble Choice freebie that stars you, Boop, on your first solo shopping trip. The game treats the idea that children are left to buy six of whatever they want from the grocery store without supervision as if it's totally normal, so I guess that must be a thing somewhere on Earth. Co-Open shows that it probably shouldn't be.

I know where this timeline is going, dear reader.

The game description pitches being able to find and all sorts of goings-on and talk to different characters, which is technically true. In practice, though, they all just want you to find a bunch of items and give it to them. There's one eldritch cloud-esque character hiding in the ventilation shafts that wants a random assortment of products that each take about a minute to go down and get, which quickly gets tedious. It does a good job of representing the crazy things kid would imagine are hiding in the basement or the rafters, but not so much at representing ways kids would imagine interacting with them. None of the many Pokemon friends I imagined ever wanted me to bring a calendar over.

Medina knows it had to be done. Food is secondary.

When you're done messing around in the side areas, all that's left is to pick up six items and bring them to the register to check out. The cashier will say some generic lines about your items, then Grandma comes back to pick you up and gives a very long speech that's the same every time before briefly addressing the things you did and what you bought. Alas, the "toilet paper salad" in the intro is what she says for any paper item. It was a "greeting card salad" in my second try.

But hey, it's a freebie that's 20 minutes long, so you really can't expect too much. This one is definitely worth playing if you have access to it. I wouldn't be desperately searching for it, though.

Time to finish: 20 minutes

Platform: PC

MSRP: Exclusive to Humble Choice for now