Redeliver

Redeliver is a short and linear Ren’Py visual novel with a few light puzzle elements and a medieval fantasy setting. The player will experience one day from the life of Red – a young girl hired by the Royal Post House to deliver unclaimed letters directly to people’s households. With the goal of reaching her grandma who lives in another district, she will need to traverse several regions, delivering letters to inhabitants, as she travels.

Red has a wonderful personality. Not only is she kind-hearted, polite and nice to everyone, but she also seems to be more mature than her apparent young age. She will talk to people, asking around for clues about the whereabouts of the letters’ recipients, bonding with them and listening to their stories. Some of them will ask her to help them with a life-changing decision, and as a player you will be confronted with a choice of answers that have neither a good nor a bad outcome. Most of these choices do not affect the story further, but will be recorded and presented in the end as a summary of notable answers.

Despite having multiple options, the visual novel is fairly linear, with three separate endings that are slightly changed based on the last two choices. Upon entering a new region, Red will acquire a map and the task to deliver three letters, with the quests triggering sequentially. The locations of the recipients are unknown, and Red will need to use the map to visit the households, talk to people, and gather information about where they were last spotted. As a player, you have a bit of movement space, but overall the story will still be linear, since the different stages need to be completed in a certain order.

Some of the people you meet will ask Red to help them with a specific task, which is usually finding an object based on certain characteristics – a sort of a hidden object scene, with only one item to find among several similar ones. Apart from that, the game has two types of collectibles – there are special people to find and books scattered throughout various scenes.

For the modest price of $1, I think Redeliver is well worth picking up. Even short, it does offer a lot of content, there are many characters to meet, several plot twists to experience, quick and easy puzzles, collectibles and both missable and story-related achievements. Additionally, the artwork is very simple, yet beautifully drawn. It takes around 2h if you want to read everything, but the dialogues can also be skipped, like in any other VN. All in all, it was a very enjoyable and heartwarming little game.