Easy Delivery Co. Review (PC): Cruising With Cute Animals Has Never Felt More Eerie

It’s safe to say that early PlayStation polygons have replaced pixel art as the dominant form of nostalgia bait within the video game space. This style is most often employed in the survival horror genre, thanks to such influential titles as Silent Hill or Resident Evil. Many of the games that make a pastiche out of their predecessors in this way seem to do so solely for its own sake. That is to say that oftentimes this aesthetic serves as an homage to an earlier time, and little else beyond that. With all that said, I was pretty impressed by how Easy Delivery Co. takes this blocky aesthetic down a brand-new road.

Easy Delivery Co. Is a Compelling Clash of Cozy and Eerie

Easy Delivery Co. markets itself as a cozy game. This is, from my personal experience, maybe a half-lie. The aforementioned art style immediately gives the game an eerie feeling, as if to signal to the player that all is not well in these snowy mountains. In that way, invoking survival horror aesthetics feels almost novel. After all, this is a game about delivering packages. The gameplay loop this entails is uniquely serene, but I would still hesitate to call it truly cozy.

This dissonance comes from more than just the drab color palette or the “rough” look of the environment. Rather, the mountainside on which players do their business is indeed as unusual as it looks. The world is populated with Animal Crossing-like characters, which again intends to gesture at the common language of so-called cozy games. However, their dialogue is often as off-putting as it is endearing.

Players have plenty of resources to juggle, and the environment isn’t always forgiving. Players have to keep their delivery truck fueled, and their bloodstream pumping with energy drinks if they’re going to take any jobs. Oh, and they have to earn enough money from those jobs to afford any of the resources they need to continue taking them. It’s worth noting that players will almost never have enough for a full tank of gas. Did I mention you can freeze to death?

Nowhere is this contrast more stark than in what I have come to call the game’s “death segments”. Whenever the player dies, they are promptly dropped into an entirely separate setting. Instead of the familiar snowy small town, they now occupy a concrete maze shrouded almost entirely in darkness. It’s hard not to recall Zelda’s “Lost Woods”, which, as out of place as it may seem, seemingly serves as one of the primary pay-offs for the mystery the game drags you into.

In short, Easy Delivery Co. builds its identity on the backs of Silent Hill and Animal Crossing. In reality, the moment-to-moment experience bears a closer resemblance to the chore segments of games like Shenmue or No More Heroes. This is, somehow, seemingly for the best.

Driving is Delightful in Easy Delivery Co.

Like any game, Easy Delivery Co. certainly has its ups and downs. By invoking such a vintage style, one is basically asking to bring along the baggage that comes with it. In short, you have to take the good with the bad. With that in mind, let’s start with the good news.

Navigation is a clear stand-out. Easy Delivery Co. forsakes the waypoints and quest markers that have become hallmarks of modern gaming and trades them in for a basic map, road signs, and the occasional landmark. There’s not even a marker for the player’s own location, nor are quest-relevant buildings marked on the map. This analog feels personally served as a breath of fresh air, but it could just as likely be pretty frustrating to any players who have come to rely on a higher quality of life. It’s a bit easy to get lost at first, as players are more or less dropped into the world with no handholding. This does prove uniquely satisfying once you start to learn your way around the place without even noticing.

Modern games have similarly conditioned players to treat vehicles and other tools as an extension of themselves. This can make traversing the world feel painfully simple. Meanwhile, Easy Delivery Co. makes traversal feel perfectly clunky. Players have to manually open and close the tailgate when loading up a package. The truck maintains its own momentum if the player happens to step out before parking, which very often flings it too far to reach before one suffers another death-by-blizzard.

Easy Delivery Co. Could Do With More Depth

Unfortunately, the sense of urgency in Easy Delivery Co. behind each job is almost nonexistent, which serves to expose the stakes of the game as somewhat artificial. The game’s environment is chock full of setpieces which are practically begging you to go wild, between precarious ramps and snow-filled shortcuts. These detours are seldom worth taking, despite how fun it would likely be to engage with them more frequently. If Easy Delivery Co. featured some kind of timer to encourage players to complete their deliveries more quickly, then there would be a lot more incentive for genuinely creative driving. This could throw a slight wrench in the game’s cozy intentions, so one simply has to wonder if the trade-off was worth it.

Easy Delivery Co.’s characters are an altogether mixed bag. Seemingly, no one else drives on the road; a disappointing emptiness that also happens to create a serene loneliness. Dialogue throughout the game is witty and often adds to the game’s off-putting comedy. Repeating lines can damage the immersion that anyone in this town is a flesh-and-blood living being, but it’s entirely possible that this was an intentional invocation of the game’s more eerie elements.

There are two particular stand-outs as far as NPCs go, who also happen to serve as a perfect representation of the duality players experience throughout the game. First is the guy who fills up your gas tank. Frankly, he’s a total jackass, especially when you can’t afford a full tank, which, as I mentioned, is almost always. This is more endearing than it is frustrating, as it further immerses the player in how dreary being a delivery driver actually is. It’s great, then, that the game supplies you with a dog character who pretty much serves as your closest confidant. By resting at the end of every major quest, the dog doubles as the game’s informal progression system. More than anything, it’s just nice to have a friend in such an unfamiliar place.

Of course, it’s not as if every game needs to have as rich a narrative as any other. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a game that gives players more questions than answers. However, this remains a sticking point for Easy Delivery Co. precisely because of how much it seems to pull the player’s attention in this direction. By invoking survival horror aesthetics, the game succeeds in creating an aura of mystique. One only wishes there were a bit more depth to the answers behind these questions. At the very least, Easy Delivery Co. might be improved if there were more personal items to play around with, more tasks outside of your job to work towards, and more stones to turn over.

Final Verdict

Easy Delivery Co. is a game in which, ironically, your mileage may vary. If you’re easily frustrated by a game that leans a bit into clunkiness, you might want to pass. If, like me, you found the intentional blows to quality of life to enrich the experience, I would consider this an open recommendation. Easy Delivery Co. carries plenty of charm, but more than anything, it plunges players deep into a calming isolation. Loneliness can kill, but in this case, it’s a nice opportunity to crank up the radio and pretend like you have a full-time job.

If you’re a fan of either Silent Hill or Animal Crossing and looking to get your fix with a game that is wholly similar to either one, then Easy Delivery Co. might not be made for you. However, if you’re a player who wants to sink your teeth into a genuinely compelling experience that doesn’t ask much more than a few late-night hours of your time, then I can say for sure that developer Sam C certainly delivered.

Easy Delivery Co. was reviewed on PC with a code provided by Oro Interactive.

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