So you’ve said specifically, “this location has no plot significance.” There’s nothing wrong with using locations as a liminal space, or I could see this essentially serving as an “establishing shot” like a title card in a movie letting the player know the game or the next scene takes place in a pharmacy. If that’s all they need to know, why distract them (and potentially add 10 minutes to your 2 hours IFComp playtime!) if there’s no plot to be found here?
My preference given that is actually this:
This provides good authorial voice and world building without adding fifteen things to distract the player from the plot which ostensibly happens inside.
Look at the extra work in this one:
That is about nine extra things to fool with that don’t advance the plot. The question to ask is do any of these things need descriptions?
While you can write clever prose about each item like in example #2, you need to decide what important things will this teach the player and whether that’s worth 1000 extra words. The only slightly important thing you’ve added in #3 is a drive-up window, but that’s never the first thing I’d see pulling up to a Walgreens.
Something to remember: trust your audience’s imagination. Everyone’s been in a pharmacy parking lot. Is there any honest literary value you can add by describing all those things over again?
Maybe the answer to that is yes - say if this is a zombie pharmacy or a pharmacy for fish at the bottom of the ocean! Or, if it’s ordinary give it one unique detail to be memorable. But you might not want a game of all this:
“The sidewalk, like every sidewalk you’ve ever seen, runs across the front of the building to prevent customers from needing to walk on bare ground or grass. Poured cement you observe, knowingly, also noting that the surface is divided every few feet by a neat line-like division between segments so that settling and ground movement will prevent the cement segments from stressing and showing actual cracks for a couple of years.”
Another thing to consider: every description you write will invariably introduce new scenic detail nouns that you will then be compelled to implement and describe. The more detail you put into descriptions, the more digging the player will do - especially if they don’t know your game loop yet and are not wanting to miss anything important.
If there’s not something special and plot-worthy about the bricks or the automatic doors or the sidewalks, give your reader permission to fill in ordinary detail with their imagination.*
*Unless, of course, you’re Douglas Adams and can write an entire page about a drink coaster and make it hilarious.
TL;DR: There’s something to be said for realism, but in reality, I don’t notice nor examine every smidgin of every parking lot I walk through.