Cat Mail Co. by developer Maracas Studio and publisher Gamersky Games - PC(Steam) review by Richard with a copy provided by the publisher.
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
What a meow-gnificent evening it is to send your paw-rcels out to those family and friends! Are mew looking to pick up an item or send something out? Well at Cat Mail Co. we can send and receive all your deliveries!
In Cat Mail Co. you take on the role of the newest postal employee at the post office on Cat Island. Unfortunately, the old post office senior doesn’t seem to be around, so you need to get used to the post office on your own!
Work at the post office is done in shifts between morning and night, with two divisions in your shifts. At the beginning of a shift you will be dealing with customers showing up. Either they will ask for a parcel or give you items to send. If they ask for a parcel they will either give a name or a description of a parcel and you need to locate it and bring it to them. For example, they may ask for a parcel for Evie Nightclaw, and you then need to find a parcel addressed to Evie N. sent to Cat Island. Or they may be obtuse about what they need and say something along the lines of “a parcel that isn’t lightweight that was attacked by a griffon”, and then you need to go find a heavy box with scratch marks on the package. Nifty tip, if the person coming for a package doesn’t specify something, it means it doesn’t apply. For example, packages can be heavy or fragile. If the customer doesn’t specify one of the two, the package is neither, at least as far as I’ve seen in the current build state.
If the customer offers you a parcel, it is now your job to properly put the necessary stickers on the package to get it ready for sending out. Parcels need a destination sticker, a number of stickers for the weight, and any extra conditions, such as fragile or heavy. As you continue to play you will unlock more conditions, such as packages that need to stay hot or cold. Once you’ve dealt with a certain number of customers, the phase of the shift changes and the boat captain comes rolling in. He brings you gifts of parcels for Cat Island, and you need to grab them from the ship and sort them how you wish. Once all the parcels are off the ship, the boat captain will tell you where his destination is. You must now play tetris with outgoing packages to send them to their intended recipient. As an example, Windy Bay is the first place to ship to, but the space on the ship is small. You may only be able to fit four or five packages on the ship, depending on their size. You also need to pay attention to the heavy and fragile packages. Once you’re happy with your work, you can send him off.
At this point your shift ends and you are awarded with points based on your statistics such as: packages delivered by hand, packages sent by ship, and any negative points from packages ruined by improper storing, or by putting the wrong package on the ship. If you do send a mis-stickered package it will be returned to you next time the boat captain comes by. Once you earn enough points you unlock something new. Sometimes it’s a new location, sometimes it’s a new condition on packages such as the hot or cold rooms.
In addition to all this there are massive piles of packages in the back hallway, and in the hot and cold rooms. If you pull enough packages out of these piles they will shrink. Do your best to completely clean up the piles, and maybe you can figure out the mystery of where the previous postman has gone!
Cat Mail Co. is a cozy game about sorting your office, cleaning up the mess, and getting a job well done by cleaning out your backlog of parcels. It’s actually quite soothing. There’s something quite satisfying about sending thirty or more packages out on the ship and completely clearing out a full shelf of packages for a destination. I can definitely say there were some times where I was getting worried because my freezer was filling up too fast, or my dedicated destination shelf was overflowing and I had to make an emergency overflow shelf, but a good system goes a long way.
There are a few issues here and there, but they are getting gradually patched out as the game continues. Currently the only issue I have in the current version is that occasionally packages put on the top of shelves in the cold and hot rooms may sometimes get damaged regardless of the fact they're in the corresponding room. It doesn't seem to happen to all packages, or even just the general top shelf sometimes, so try and keep things on the shelves proper or the floor until that gets sorted.
Oh, and did I mention you can play with friends? Yup, you and up to three friends can tackle the job together! Work together to create a perfectly organized system for managing your inventory. Or totally mess things up when your friends aren’t looking and drive them nuts. Either way, Cat Mail Co. is a great time to be had fur all your mail-time needs!
Score: 9 / 10
