Supermarket Shriek
Supermarket Shriek
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Supermarket Shriek hands-on — maneuvering a shopping cart using your voice

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 2 min

Supermarket Shriek is a ridiculously amusing two-player co-op game where you maneuver a shopping cart through treacherous supermarket tracks by using your voice.

I’m pretty sure you won’t see any other game like it at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), the big game trade show in Los Angeles this week. I saw the title at a preview event and had a chance to play it. On paper, I’m sure that no one would ever greenlight this game. But it’s actually a hoot to play.

I played the party game with a game controller. But you can play it with a couple of microphones. It can get very loud. You have to scream loud into the microphone to make the shopping cart turn in one direction. The other player has to scream at the same time that you do in order to make the shopping car drive straight. If you stop shrieking, the cart will turn in the other direction if the other player keeps shrieking.

I managed to shriek my way through with a goat in my cart in Supermarket Shriek.

With this style, you can maneuver the shopping cart through the crooked and crowded aisle of the supermarkets. If you can race through quickly, you get up to three stars and have a chance to beat others on the leaderboard.

Belfast, Ireland-based Billy Goat Entertainment is making the game. It started a couple of years ago as a game jam idea that Will Barr and one of his friends, Paul Kelly. They were big fans of the game show Supermarket Sweep, and they happened to be watching some funny videos about shrieking sheep. So they got working on the title.

The game has 32 levels, starting at the rough end of town. The buildings are falling apart. You gradually unlock more shops. By the end of the game, you’re walking among ice sculptures in the streets and glamorous luxury stores. Barr said in an interview with GamesBeat that there aren’t many game studios in Belfast. Barr himself was a TV show animator. But he made a lot of mods for titles like Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six and eventually taught himself how to make a game.

Now the company has five people. The team is self-publishing the title on Steam and the Xbox One before the end of the summer.

Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.