Easy Delivery Co. | Anna's reviews

Summary

In Easy Delivery Co., you play as a cat employed to deliver packages to and from various businesses across three regions. While navigating the snowy roads and managing to keep your packages in the truck bed instead of on the road, you slowly discover that not everything is as it first seems.

Screenshot of the game. A first-person view of the cabin of one of those small work trucks. It's a right-side drive truck and your character has his two paws on the wheel, though you can't see any arms and the paws are mostly blob shaped. In the rearview you can see two packages stacked on top of each other, and through the windshield is a snowy, dreary landscape with a bridge immediately coming up. The HUD displays your character's energy, money, the current time, and the amount of gas left in the truck's tank. The current radio station also appears. — This game will have no underlying themes about capitalism, I'm sure.

Story

The story in Easy Delivery Co. is slowly revealed to you as you make deliveries. The pacing is very good; you remain interested and hooked by the dialogue from shopkeepers throughout the entirety of the game. From the first delivery you'll be handed a thread to pull to unravel a mystery that spans the entire game. Each subsequent delivery pulls a little more on the thread, revealing the workings hidden within.

Screenshot of the game showing your character, now in a third-person view, inside of what looks like a cramped dining establishment. There is an NPC saying "Jeepers, you look like the spitting image of Seb." — Who's Seb?

Nearly immediately, you meet a dog on the side of the road who eventually invites you to meet him at his house in a different area, which is not currently accessible to you. This is a nice hook and gives you an immediate goal besides delivering packages and making money. Once you're able to meet him, you realise that most, if not all, of your main goals are given to you by the dog, which keeps things simple but not uninteresting.

To go further would spoil the story, but the eccentricities of the shopkeepers around the towns — who are all the same based on the shop, regardless of town — soon reveal themselves to be something deeper. There are quite a few clues pointing to the heart of the mystery, and the reveal pays off well. In my opinion, though, I don't like the final reveal. I like the concept, but it's a bit too modern for me. Hard to talk about without spoiling it!

Third-person view screenshot showing your character outside, truck not visible. He's standing next to a log fire and a dog NPC. The NPC is saying "Hey there, 'new guy'." — This dog hums the main theme of the game when you get close.

Gameplay

You pick up the package, put it in the truck, and drive it to the destination. This game will definitely appeal to a certain type of person, and perhaps the average FPS player will find this game "boring". If you like the routine of doing deliveries and the challenge of driving on snowy roads, though, you'll love it. Furthermore, the radio really helps make the driving nice and relaxing, which I'll talk about more in the audio section.

Third-person screenshot where your character is holding a package above his head. He's next to the back of the truck, and the UI is showing the word "place" at the truck bed. In the background is the dog and fire from before. — This is the core loop of the game right here.

The game makes excellent use of simple maps and visual cues. Accepting a job shows you where the pickup is on your map, but opening your map requires pausing the game. You won't be following a line on your minimap, but you'll be memorising a list of steps to take to get to your destination. The map also does not show your current location, so relying on road signs and knowing the direction you're going in are paramount to keeping track of your location. This is excellent and really keeps you in the world.

First-person screenshot inside of the truck with a UI overlayed. The UI is titled "jobs.exe" and shows a minimal map of the area. Various points of interest are marked, but your location is not. The bottom of the UI says "Deliver the package to Weston". — The pin on the map here is the dropoff point.

After you've followed your directions and consulted your map a few times, you'll know you've arrived when you see the shop with its light on out front. The pickup location has its light on, and the destination is marked by a dropoff icon on your HUD, which only appears when you're fairly close to the dropoff. Besides this, there is no indication of where to go besides markers on the map. I find this extremely engaging and an excellent use of in-world visual cues. It feels very natural to navigate this way, and it makes you feel like the world is more real than it is.

Third-person screenshot outside of the truck. Your character has some packages held over his head. He's facing toward a dropoff marker on the UI. — This marker appears on the HUD about 150m away from your destination, and it moves to the exact location when you get very close.

After driving up to the pickup location, you'll want to get out and walk into the store, but you'll need to be quick about it! Being outside will cause you to start freezing, eventually leading to your death. Heading inside or getting into your truck will warm you up. You'll chat to the shopkeeper for a minute, and they'll put the package on the floor for you. You have to pick up the package, go outside, lower the tailgate (or lower it while you're walking in like me), put the package in the bed, raise the tailgate (or the package will slide off the bed and onto the road when you accelerate), and get into your truck.

With package in truck, the map will show you your destination, which you'll probably want to memorise some basic turns and steps to get to. Switch the radio on and go driving! The game is lenient with you and allows parts of your package to fall off the truck, which is good! The packages slip and slide very easily, and the game would be very boring if you had to go extremely slowly to keep the whole package together. So long as any part of your package makes it, you'll get the full payment. However, if your package completely falls out of the truck, you'll have to recover it, which lowers your tip.

This is just the core gameplay loop. You'll also be able to make campfires, brew tea and coffee, gamble for cosmetic items, find bobbleheads for your truck dashboard, fish, cook soup, and I'm sure even more! You'll also have to gas up and discover that gas prices differ in each town. Driving around, you may notice some radio towers, and you can go into them and turn them on to widen the radio signal and expand the station's track list. There are upgrades for your truck that are mandatory for story progression, as well.

Third-person view inside of a cosy log cabin. Your character is facing the camera and holding a mug of coffee. The dog from earlier is here, still humming. There is a wood-fire stove in the corner that is currently lit. — Coffee keeps your energy up much better than energy drinks.

Graphics

Do you like PSX games? This game is that aesthetic. It plays well and looks good at lower resolutions, which is good considering my computer could barely pull 90 FPS around 1080p. After playing this game, though, I ended up playing Symphony of the Night because I wanted more of the PSX look. It nails the style.

First-person view inside the truck. There's a street sign that's illegible but has some text overlayed above top it that says "Weston". In the distance is another sign that is marked "To Easton" in the same manner. A dropoff indicator on the HUD shows that the delivery point is 160m away. — You're gonna see a lot of this sort of thing while driving.

The weather effects are very nice, and when you're caught in a blizzard at night, you'll definitely want to slow down so you can see. It's pretty in the day and appropriately dark at night. Your headlights light up the road nicely when you remember to turn them on. It's all as you would expect in the weather and lighting department.

First-person view inside the truck. It's now night outside, so things are darker. To the left side is a steep cliff with no guardrail. The truck's headlights are on. In the distance is a red light. — It's pretty moody at night.

The stores and other buildings all share the same textures, which is fine. They're low-res enough that it doesn't really matter, and it fits the aesthetic well, in my opinion. Things are pixelly in an intentional way, and I find that some of the models and textures exhibit classic PSX emulation distortion. This is actually fixed in newer PSX emulators, but I think it works well for the game's style.

The graphics don't feel like they're just cashing in on a PSX trend like many of the PSX-style horror games you can find on itch. It feels like care was put into the design, and that makes everything gel together much more cohesively. There's also a nice CRT rounding in the corners of the screen, which is configurable.

Audio

The soundtrack in this game, which you can purchase separately, is stellar. From what I understand, the tracks on the radio were made specifically for this game, and they are very well done. There are multiple radio stations for different genres, including lo-fi and electronic. There's also a talk radio station where none of the talking is intelligible in case you want non-musical background noise, which I did avail myself of a few times.

The truck sounds how I expect a truck to sound. All the sound effects are balanced well and appropriate. I really had no complaints about the sound effects while playing, and I found them all to increase immersion into the game world. The talking sound effects are Animal Crossing-esque, though I don't think there are sounds for each letter specifically.

The radio on lo-fi is very relaxing while driving through the snowy, dreary landscapes. I did actually end up changing stations to not fall asleep, but never did I feel the urge to mute the music in-game and play my own music. Especially when you continue to expand the track selection by turning on additional radio towers, you just want to listen to the radio.

First-person view inside the truck. It's daytime again, and the truck is climbing up a mound of snow toward a small shack with a radio tower next to it. A street sign says "Upton Radio Tower". — A radio tower building you must enter in order to switch it on.

Conclusion

You should play Easy Delivery Co. I don't think I can do it justice in a review. It is satisfying and relaxing to play. I lost track of time when I'd sit down and just get in the flow of doing deliveries. Having to interact with the map and actually process your surroundings instead of just following a GPS really makes it easy to get absorbed into the game, and that's a sign of a very well-made game! Give it a try and unravel its mysteries!