Soul Delivery

Soul Delivery is a short and adorable story-rich 2D adventure that is in some aspects reminiscent of Cloudpunk. Although the two games are essentially very distinct, belong to different genres and have a notable quality gap between them, they do share a similar cyberpunk-futuristic environment with a city of neon lights, robots and human-electronic networks serving as their setting, and both stories revolve around the idea of fulfilling one or more deliveries.

Soul Delivery plays as a side-scroller adventure in which you can have ample dialogues with the NPCs, complete fetch quests by picking up objects from the game world and then delivering them to their respective NPCs, or explore its wonderful universe to gather a few collectibles.

The game is delivered in chapter-size chunks of an hour each. Currently available to play are only the first two chapters (taking around 1.5h – 2h to complete if the dialogues are not skipped). A third chapter is planned to be released in the future as a paid DLC. The chapters are non-linear and so far they have rather unrelated stories, but these will likely be linked together in the upcoming chapter which will hopefully also provide a conclusion to the story.

Soul Delivery is a one-man project, thus the game is not perfect. I haven’t encountered any game-breaking bugs, but some smaller edge areas can appear unfinished (nothing too bothersome though). The conversations often have different branches consistent with the choices picked, but they ultimately don’t have any effect on the game progression or any impact on the story. The (solo) developer freely admits that English is not their native language, and there are some awkward sentences and a couple of typos. Although still fully intelligible, the second chapter especially requires some intensive proofreading. The collectibles are also not yet implemented for this chapter. One could say that it is still a work in progress and an Early Access tag would be more appropriate, yet at the moment the game isn’t marked as such.

Soul Delivery is a very cute and enjoyable experience and the current issues are rather minor. However, it’s very unfortunate that buyers of the full game are left with a cliffhanger (because only the first two chapters are provided) and that experiencing the full story will require additional expenses. It would also be great if Steam achievements were implemented in the future.

_{Disclaimer: This review is based on a press preview copy of the game, kindly provided by Single-minded Ryan via The Indie Game Collective.}