Review: Mail Time Delivers a Cute and Cozy Weekend Game

Fall is the time that brings to mind curling up in front of the fire while sipping some tea and listening to the rain pitter-patter against the window. It’s the best season for a cozy game or two, and Mail Time delivers on this obligation with flying colors. Between its cute cottagecore aesthetic, short play time, and fun yet simple gameplay, it’s a nice way to spend a weekend evening.

In Mail Time, you play as a Mail Scout who’s on their very first mission: to deliver a letter to someone named Greg! This is your very first official assignment and you want to make sure you do it perfectly. Unfortunately, you don’t know where Greg is. In fact, you don’t even know what Greg looks like! So you have to ask the animals around Grumblewood Grove to find out the destination of your client. But the animals of Grumblewood Grove have their own problems that only you, a Mail Scout, can solve. As you help everyone out and get to know them better, so too do you learn more things about life. And yes, you also learn where Greg is.

Mail Time is essentially a giant fetch quest. Each time you finish delivering a letter, the recipient or the sender will ask you to perform yet another task. Sometimes, you’ll need to find items for people, such as looking for a lens to fix up a telescope. There’s no map in the game, so you’ll have to rely on your own powers of observation, as well as put in the work exploring Grumblewood Grove. Luckily, the directions that the animals give you are pretty clear, and there are plenty of landmarks you can use to keep track of things. Even I, Lost Girl Extraordinaire, was able to complete the game in under two hours. So I’m sure that those with a better sense of direction and memory than me (basically 90% of gamers in the world) will not have much trouble navigating the map.

Mail Time’s style is very cute. It reminds me of comics from the mid-2010s era of Tumblr. This made it a bit difficult to tell if the lack of punctuation or proper capitalization was a purposeful choice or not. The theme of the game, which the characters straight up say, reminds me of PSA text posts I might have seen on Tumblr as well. The emphasis on not having to do things perfectly is a nice reminder, especially since I’m also the type of person who procrastinates or over-thinks my work because I’m so focused on trying to make sure it’s absolutely flawless. Because of how short the game is, it’s understandable that the writer had no choice but to directly write out the theme in the dialog instead of relying on the classic “show, don’t tell” rule. The point of the game isn’t really the story anyway.

Because of how small the development team is, as well as limited funding compared to a bigger company, I can understand how short Mail Time is. I’m really impressed at how smoothly the game plays. The only bug I encountered was the game occasionally freezing after certain dialog, but you can easily fix it by talking to the NPC again. The parkour is easy, with comfortable physics that make the game feel good to play. It’s fun to explore Grumblewood Grove as well because of how vibrant the environment feels, even though there’s nothing to really interact with aside from the animals. It reminds me a lot of PS-era games (in a positive way), both in the graphics and in the simplicity of the gameplay loop.

I liked how tangible my improvement was as I played the game. In the beginning, I was always lost and had trouble balancing on smaller platforms like cattails. However, I quickly learned to navigate from character to character on the map. As I became more familiar with the grove, traveling from area to area took me no time at all. It was a fantastic feeling. The only thing that I felt could have used a bit more work was in the interactions with the characters. The conclusion of the game felt a little weak and unsatisfying, because the Mail Scout and the residents of Grumblewood Grove didn’t seem that close to me. Yet the game presented them like they’re all best friends for life, which felt at odds with what I experienced in the story proper.

Mail Time is readily available on the Windows PC via Steam. It will come out on the Nintendo Switch, PS4, and PS5 on October 19, 2023.