Shark Mart makes running the shop the alibi for eating the customers

You and your friends are sharks wearing a dolphin disguise, running a shop on the ocean floor for the fish who live there. The shift is real work: stock the shelves with seashells and fresh seaweed, serve the locals, keep the place spotless, and buff the visiting whales along the belly and fins until they sparkle. The other job is in the basement, where the customers you drag downstairs become the day’s delicacies.

The unusual part is that neither job is a minigame bolted to the other. The shop runs on the ordinary verbs of a service sim — restock, serve, scrub — and every one of those verbs is also cover. Trust earned by cleaning a whale is trust you get to spend later on a fish nobody watches leave.

That makes the resource being managed suspicion rather than money. The whale grooming is the clearest version of it: whales are the largest and most public customers in the shop, and winning them over is how the smaller fish decide you are safe to stand next to. Reputation flows downhill from the biggest animal in the room, which is a much more interesting shopkeeping stat than a five-star rating.

The Fish Police close the loop. They turn up, look around, and ask questions, which turns the mess you left into evidence and the answer you give into a move. Cleaning in most job sims is a chore with a progress bar attached; here it is the difference between a shift and an arrest, and the same mop does both.

It also splits sensibly across people. Somebody has to be visible at the counter, smiling, while somebody else is downstairs with the day’s special — an alibi needs a body standing in it. That is a genuine division of labour rather than four players doing the same task faster, and it means the worst moment in a session is a teammate surfacing at the wrong time with the wrong thing in their mouth.

How stealth game guards see and hear is the load-bearing reference. Its argument is that guards run on simulated sight and hearing, and that how much of that machinery you show the player is what decides whether stealth feels tense or tactical. Shark Mart hands that role to its customers and its police, so the whole game turns on one tuning question: is a flash of teeth an instant tell, or a slow accumulation of doubt you can still talk your way out of? Show too little and it feels arbitrary, show too much and the shop becomes a puzzle you solve once.

Is The Swindle the first great heist game? covers the other half. The essay argues that punishing failure is only part of what makes a heist work, and the rest is temptation — the design quietly nudging you into greedy, risky jobs, and those being the jobs worth playing. Shark Mart builds the temptation into the storefront. Every customer is simultaneously a sale and an ingredient, and the fish worth grabbing is always the one currently standing in a busy shop.

Can we make talking as much fun as shooting? is the one that decides whether the police scenes land. Its point is that dialogue gets interesting when it asks you to read people, spend what you have learned, and risk being wrong. Lying through an interrogation is a real promise, but only if the answers are choices with consequences behind them rather than a menu waiting for you to pick the obviously safe line.

Shark Mart is by stre1itzia and Andryash, published by Polden Publishing, coming to Windows with no date announced. It is filed under Casual, Indie and Simulation, and it runs solo or in online co-op.

The tone is comedy rather than horror, which is the right call — a shop where you eat the clientele is funny at cartoon scale and grim at any other. The expectation to set is a cooperative job sim with a crime attached, not a survival game, and the store page is honest about that.

If the appeal is friends holding down a respectable-looking job while the illegal part rides along underneath, Cartel Pilots Wanted is the closest sibling here. It is a flying game where the flying is easy and the cargo is the problem, in the same way this is a shop game where the shopkeeping is easy and the basement is the problem.