Mail Time
When it’s Mail Time, you know it’s a fun time. The game is a wholesome and casual delivery simulator, in which you take the role of a mail scout on their first day of work. While fulfilling delivery contracts, you get to explore a wonderful world inhabited by whimsical creatures. You’ll help them solve their conflicts or reconnect with old friends, find the items they lost, become a messenger of love and even be part of a secret operation.
At its core, Mail Time is a blend of a walking simulator / platformer. The gameplay loop consists in talking to various characters in the game world, picking up their letters and delivering them to their recipients. Some of these characters will additionally give you some side quests to collect and bring them certain items. There is no story per se (the game starts rather abruptly with your first delivery and a small tutorial explaining what you are expected to do), but the essence of the narrative lies in the background stories that you’ll get to experience when talking to the characters. The dialogues are extremely funny, filled with witty replies and often have an edgy style. The language differences between the way the characters speak give each of them individual personalities and a special kind of flavor, depending on the place they hold in their little community.
Mail Time is all about being small in a big world and doing little good deeds with a big impact. All characters (including yours) are like miniature representations of animals (or a human in your case), and everything surrounding them or you looks supersized. Running through a field of giant sunflowers, jumping on bouncy mushrooms to reach higher heights, gliding down from tall trees or feeling like a tiny ant running through someone’s picnic spread are just a few of the satisfying things you will get to experience in-game. The environment is simply beautiful. The map is not exceedingly large, yet it contains areas of different biomes. There’s no teleport option and you won’t even need one because there are lots of shortcuts that you can take.
Mail Time is a pretty incredible game, however, it’s not a bug-free one and the bugs can dampen your enjoyment to some extent. At the moment of writing this review, several mail deliveries cannot be completed and one of the NPCs is stuck in a loop, preventing you from handing in some quests. The game can be finished without these, but the achievements related to these actions are broken (they don’t trigger). Additionally, tabbing out can sometimes cause you to lose mouse input (camera rotation) and it can also happen that the UI elements completely disappear, making you unable to progress until you change the area. The game is more or less a one-person passion project, thus fixing these issues could take some time.
Mail Time is a short, cute and peaceful game that takes around three to four hours to complete. Sadly, there isn’t much replayability value, and the deliveries are scripted (they’re not randomly generated, in the sense that you cannot infinitely pick up new mail requests). However, the game is full of positivity and interacting with the characters is bound to lighten up your mood.