Let’s Get Into The Design Weeds With Mail Time

As long time readers will know, forever chasing the highs of A Short Hike is a crutch I just can’t seem to shake. After playing the demo for Mail Time when it featured in a Steam Next Fest, its focus on platforming for fun over challenge had my interest piqued. What makes A Short Hike such a joy is in the movement around the world itself - climbing, gliding and running around feels satisfyingly tactile in ways very few games outside 3D Mario can pull off.

The best times I had with Mail Time pulled on this thread very well. Your basic movement is made up of a standard double jump and glide, but crucially, the second jump can be initiated at any time. You can be halfway through a glide, jump again, and continue gliding. Combine this with  with jumps being quite generous with height, along with plenty of bouncy platforms to take advantage of, and bounding around this cosy little world gets at the very base joy of play.

As fun as making your way around the space can be however, having a goal to keep you moving forward is what drives that need to explore. Due to the premise of Mail Time being - shockingly - delivering mail, there’s plenty of reasons to be bouncing all over, chatting with the local folk, completing quests and the like. So why did it feel like less like a cosy couple of hours, and more like busy work?

At first I thought it might be the tasks themselves. Mail Time boiled down to it’s essence is a collection of fetch quests. Go here, talk to this person, then go there and talk to someone else. Collect X things, bring them back to me. Classic game stuff. However, that’s kind of the point - all games, good and bad, break their hashtag content down in the exact same set of tasks at the end of the day. It’s often the writing that masks this basic repetitive loop to draw you in, get you invested and have you fall in love with the world. Conclusion: Mail Time’s writing must be sub par.

Except, that’s not true at all. Mail Time sits squarely in the same realm as Lil Gator Game, where the cutesy dialog reflects the childlike wonder of it’s smarter-than-they-should-be-for-their-age protagonists. Though conversations with various characters do go on for several more speech bubbles than they should at times, the banter between characters is often endearing and frequently funny. 

This piece is out quite a ways after Mail Time’s release as I was hoping that a few bugs still persistent in the game would be resolved with a little more tinkering. There’s a few issues around delivering different mushroom samples to Toph which I also ran into, and was hoping for a fix before setting this piece live that are as yet still unresolved. Despite a small handful of technical issues, the game comes together well, and runs great on Steam Deck, even if playing offline broke my play time counter for some reason. There’s nothing stopping you from picking this up and having a blast all the way through - completionists, however, beware.

So moving about is joyous, the characters are cute and the low stakes motivation is as great a premise as any. The technical issues are minor in the grand scheme of things. So why am I not screaming from the rooftops about another successful cozy game and Mail Time is yet another example of how violence isn’t necessary to have a good digital time?

Having time to sit back and ponder this at 3:30am in the morning when my brain decides being awake is more preferable to sleeping, cross referencing how the game guides you about the space might be where Mail Time falls down a bit for me. The quest design pushes you all around the map multiple times, criss crossing all over the joint picking up and delivering letters and items. There’s no subtle guidance or structure to how you go about this, which puts the onus back on the player to figure it out completely.

The best games in the genre, like the aforementioned A Short Hike and Lil Gator Game use sight lines and other subtle visual queues to guide the player without them even realising towards different discreet areas of exploration. Despite being one contiguous whole, their worlds are very much segmented into areas that you move through, do some capital S Stuff in, then continue on from. Mail Time has it’s discreet areas, but you hop between them like rabbit on speed, struggling to ground yourself in each space by spending even a little bit of time there. This is, of course, the premise - it’s your literal job as a postie to go and deliver the mail.

Something that Lake did well in its mail delivery premise was in giving you everything you needed to deliver in one go each morning, clearly setting the delivery locations for the day, and letting you loose. You do the same thing in that you are returning to areas you’ve already been multiple times to deliver mail, thus building a connection with each area. Mail Time does the opposite - instead, you will have quite a collection of tasks to do at any given time, most of which are generally midway through a longer chain of tasks in its own discreet quest line.

None of this is to say that either design is better or worse, they are simply different design philosophies. I think it’s more inherently on the player what type of design suits them best. I used to think I preferred open expanses with true complete freedom the most - let me make the decisions of what I want do, game - but really chewing on the differences in these games has given me a new perspective on the more subtly authored experiences of some open world adventures.

Ah, here go. The reductive part. “So? Should I play this???” you say. Ugggghhhh why does game crit always come down to straight product review? Sure, why not. Or maybe no. I don’t know, it’s your money/time! The same can be said for pretty much every game I write about, and just about any game in existence. Does it fit what you like? Do you earn millions of dollars a year and have no time to play games, have been forced below the poverty line because we live in a bullshit world and have all the spare time in the world, or sit literally anywhere between both vectors? I can’t decide that for you. Sorry.

If you’ve skipped to the bottom of this piece for a yay/nay, might I suggest going back and reading through the thousand or so words above, thinking about them, thinking about how these words resonate with you. Yeah, I think that sounds good. See you next time.