Delivery Kore
Delivery Kore is a casual exploration / creature collector game with very sweet graphics and very relaxed gameplay. The game is not in Early Access, yet the current content, mechanics and overall development state is more suitable for an early access phase rather than a full release. Although entirely playable, there is still a big amount of technical issues that can heavily decrease your enjoyment, and the actual content / storyline is also rather thin.
In Delivery Kore you step into the shoes of a young girl tasked to help the spirits that spawn in a magical forest reincarnate into new beings. Getting in the proximity of one of these spirits will allow you to see on the top left corner of the screen which three components of the forest it needs to reach maturity and to be ready for its reincarnation. You will be picking the spirit up and carrying it with you until you find all three elements, then you imbue the spirit with the elements’ energy and eventually drop it (when it’s ready) through a magical portal to the real world. These three elements are specific for each spirit and are usually a combination of flowers or other souls inhabiting the forest.
Which of these elements spawn depends on the weather (rain, fog, sunny, etc.) or the time of day (day / night time), but all this information can be easily consulted in a compendium that is accessible anytime from the character menu, allowing you to preplan your actions. A minimap will also show you representative icons for the elements you need to collect, making it quite easy for you to spot and find them. Also fun is when multiple spirits are combined into a bigger one that inherits the properties of all the constituent spirits and you’ll end up carrying a giant turnip on your head all around the forest.
Delivery Kore is developed by a Korean studio, and there are still a couple of buttons / text snippets that were missed when the Korean-to-English translation was implemented. Aside from these, while the game is playable both with a controller and a mouse & keyboard, switching between these two while in-game completely breaks the menus, rendering buttons not clickable and making different UI panels overlap. As long as you don’t change your control scheme, you will encounter only some minor issues such as the soul sprites not being animated and some clipping of the wall tiles when you jump.
The game loop is fairly repetitive and the quests are rather ordinary (usually asking you to release a certain amount of souls into the world, or to create a specific type of spirit). However, the developers are actively working on improving the game and adding more entertaining quests, as well as fixing the current technical issues. Overall, I think Delivery Kore has a lot of potential and could very well evolve into a beautiful and stable product, but for that to happen it would need to spend some more time in the oven. If you’re interested in the game, my advice would be to pick it up during a sale or wait a few more months until it ripens up.