FREE GROCERIES
VIDEO GAME PROOF OF CONCEPTConrad Kurrle - Director & Game Designer
Peter Chang - Lead Programmer & Co-designer
Joseph Stafford - 3D Modeling
Patrick White - Creative Support
A surreal supermarket roguelite: choose a cart, stack your power-ups, and rush to the checkout before the groceries expire and mutate into menacing monsters.
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Free Groceries is a single-player roguelite told like a tall supermarket tale. Farmers Stacy & Steve plant some magic beans and wish for their failing mom-and-pop grocer to “come alive” and “grow the business.” It works...too well. Overnight the brand begins self-franchising and the groceries begin mutating into monsters! This is where you, the player, comes in.
Your first shifts ease you in. Levels 1–3 are bite-sized stores where you learn to sprint down aisles, avoid monsters, and fill a strict shopping list before the clock hits zero. Every item you collect for “free” converts to savings at checkout, money that rolls into store credit between runs. That credit buys permanent upgrades: agile carts, faster wheels, and helpful gadgets. If you fail, you start back at level 1, but with all of your tools intact.
Every 4th level is a challenge checkout: a high-pressure scenario or boss encounter that stress-tests everything you’ve learned. By Floors 5–7, the stores take on themed personalities: leaky freezers glaze corridors into slippery surfaces; moldy aisles create jungles that sprout tall grass and slows your cart; electricity can go out, cutting the lights and turning aisles it into haunted hallways. The layouts stay procedural, but the tone gets meaner.
On levels 9–11, the stores themselves mutate: aisles crawl up walls and across ceilings, conveyor paths loop arenas into Möbius puzzles, and gravity starts to fail until you’re collecting and evading in zero-g (so you better unlock the rocket cart!) Another challenge checkout looms, and then the franchise spits you into its largest, strangest store.
Level 13 is the reveal: the “mutated groceries” aren’t monsters, they’re attempting to flee the harsh envionments of these transforming grocery stores. You can keep cashing out, feeding the franchise and topping leaderboards, or you can become the namesake hero and free the groceries, shepherding them to safety.