Carefully Stamped

I've asked for a refund, the game concept seemed really nice and cosy but once I finished my first day I had to step away from the PC. When I returned to the game, I thought that my game had failed to save as I received the exact same request I had the day before, but everything I unlocked was still there. I had an issue where I paused the game as I was leaving the shop and the screen was stuck black and I couldn't do anything but open the pause menu and quit. When I loaded in again I got the same request. Overall I played only 5 days of this game and I had maybe 3 different requests; if the game is going to be this repetitive it should allow the player to save designs for quick use. This game seems far too repetitive and also grindy (you have to earn £10,000 to buy your house, I was earning maybe £200 - £300 per day) to be cosy in any sense of the word. I purchased this game on a huge sale and I would still not recommend it.

this game is cute, but that's all that it has going for it. i've done six postcards and half of them were the exact same prompt. the customers also don't care how good the card looks or if it's elaborate. you can slap two stickers on a card and they're happy with it. i would have refunded the game if i got it through steam, but can't since it was part of a bundle on another site. if you get the game for free or very cheap, maybe it's worth it, but for me, even at the weighted price of a few dollars, it wasn't worth it.

just not enough themes for the post cards. i find myself doing the same 4 subjects over and over. half the time i do them to the exact wants and it still tells me its not what they asked for.

this game is interesting the first few times, but it gets boring real quick. unless you're into the grind, i would say it's (mentally) excruciating to try and complete the game. it is cute, i'll give it that...

I am really disapointed. Game loop is boring, you have the same like... 5-ish design request and then they loop. And they aren't even that varied. The music is good, but only for so long. The design is alright, I guess, but nothing to write home about. If you enjoy designing repeated requests over and over again, then this might be for you. Or if you like to play a cosy game for 5 minutes and then be bored of it.

This game was played in its entirety on a MacBook Air M1 8gb ram 7c gpu running MacOS Sonoma. There were no bugs or crashes throughout my time with the game, though I would have had issues if the game did not end when it did. All achievements unlocked at their appropriate times. Carefully Stamped just isn't a very good game, unfortunately. I wish I could go through some positives and negatives for the application, but there is just not much to say, one way or another. The game concept is that you will design postcards for customers based on their likes and dislikes. Each graphic you can add to a postcard has one or more "tags" which will correspond to the customer likes/dislikes. Put some graphics on the card that match (cumulatively) their likes, put a stamp on it, put it in an envelope and tape it closed, and you're done. Do this two to three times a day and the day is over. When the day is over, you replenish your limited supplies (envelopes, tape, postcards, and stamps), then go home and pay bills. That is the entire game. You will have seen the entire game within two minutes of you playing it. The developers did initially have everything costing ten times as much, which might have required dozens of hours to complete. Everyone complained about this, and thankfully they changed it. I feel the current game is completable in around five hours, which is not that long, but the trouble is that I did not have any fun during those five hours. You make a very small amount of money each day. Your supplies are a fixed cost each day, and your bills are slightly randomized each day. Your only other items to buy are the hundreds of graphics to add to the cards, buying your house itself, and getting at least one of each stamp. You can calculate with some certainly how many days and how much money you need to get "everything". Everything is in quotes there because the stamps are in gacha packs, because of course they are. They were the worst part of this very boring game. A smart player will realize that customers will only request graphics that you own, so if you just don't buy ANY more graphics until the end, you can just go on autopilot as nearly every postcard will be the same. It makes the game go faster at least. I went to around day 120, and had 18k money. I backed up the save game and bought the house, then settled in to try and get all of the stamps. That was grueling. Each pack is $10, and contains four stamps. There are only 56 different stamps in the game. It took me over an hour of clicking the stamp pack over and over and over to get my final four stamps (that's all I was missing by time I arrived at the "end-game"). The backup was so that I could try again if I failed to complete the stamps. I had enough to finish buying all of the graphics and that was it! I'm sorry to be so harsh, but this doesn't even really qualify as a mobile game. There is almost nothing here, as a game, to play. Now, if you just want to design postcards, this game may have something for you. There are "some" controls for manipulating the graphics: flip, resize, rotate, and clone. It doesn't have image editor levels of controls, but you can make some designs here. The bad part, about both the game and its desirability as even a postcard designer, is that it SAVES EVERY CARD YOU EVER MAKE. And it saves them ALL TO THE SAME SAVE FILE. There is no option to stop this that I could find, nor is there an option to remove any of these cards from your file. I realize you can export the cards, but they still stay in the save file as well. After two hundred cards, the file was pushing over 100 megabytes. The game did not perform as well as it initially did, and any time the save file was accessed (any time anything new was unlocked, or a card was completed) there was a large noticeable pause. I'm not sure if the save file will just kill the game at some point, so designers beware! Thanks for reading this far. Sorry it was not a more fun review to read.

I love Sticky Business, so more of that but with postcards sounded lovely. But with jankier controls, repetitive 'quests' and characters without character, it doesn't come close to Sticky Business. On sale maybe this is worth it if you really really need more cosy graphic design based games but don't expect a masterpiece.