Cat Mail Co.

Good game, amazing atmosphere, fun sorting system but progress felt a little slow for my taste.

um dos meus cozy games favoritos do ano <3

This game offers you a nice cozy experience with no time pressure but a worthy simulation experience running a post office as a cat. I love this game, it is truly a piece or art. The game has many ways of sorting your packages and keeping them "good" while stored in your post office. You're a cat, your customers are cats too, you'll handle packages for different regions and all this is put into a cozy puzzle simulation game. There is a story to the game, which is not pushed into your face all the time. You only have to focus on a couple customers each shift and their packages. When you start off, you're in a short tutorial, in which you handle a couple packages to get to know the workings of the game. Soon after starting, the backroom area opens up and you get access to more storage and more fun. There are area's that you need to unlock too. These area's offer specific storage conditions for certain packages. During your gameplay, you'll unlock different package conditions, regions to ship too and ways to handle the packages. The puzzle effect lies purely in managing your storage and shipping packages to other regions by boat. Yes, your post office has a dock in which a boat will dock after each shift to give you more packages and to take some off your hand. The captain is a talkative guy and some of his texts are tied to the story. To be honest, it is not abundantly obvious that you follow a story and that is the beauty of it. The game has very nice music, very calming. The only downside for the music is that it can put you to sleep when you're extremely tired hehe. I mean you, the player, in this case, not the in-game character. There are two shifts each day. Even if there is no real day counter, or any sense of time progression, outside a clock that shows you the time of day, you'll work a day and a night shift. The night shift has some extra possibilities for handling your packages, which will be unlocked during your gameplay. The game has some minor things that I find slightly annoying, but not as much to write the game off. These minor things don't break the game and are personal preferences. For one, the game mixes voices, names and genders. Where cats come for a package for their wife or their mom, the names on the packages are almost always are a male name, and vice versa. When a customer sounds like a male cat, and don't give you a name, the package you need could have a female name, and vice versa. This annoys me to some extend but can easily be ignored. Another annoyance is working with linked packages. When packages are linked, the link only shows when using the appropriate machine. During day time, you won't know which packages are linked together, making it highly possible for you to send out packages with the boat and getting them back because you missed a linked package. I have not found any way to keep them together, I have to write notes on a piece of paper, or at least outside of the game, if I want to keep track of which package is linked to which other package and where they are stored. Because, putting them together is in most cases not possible. Just because they need different storage conditions. Besides these two annoyances, the game runs smoothly and wonderful. I haven't seen all content yet, because I am not yet at the end of the game. I also haven't seen the workings of the second lens, which is one of the unlocks. The game has room for more content, like a sandbox mode and difficulties. At the moment, you start a game and that is it. There is no increase in difficulty besides the different storage conditions. There is more than enough room to store your packages too, I have many shelves unused during my gameplay. The repair shop is hardly used too, because there is no need for it when everything gets stored correctly and shipped out quickly. At one point, there was an update, which increased the amount of packages that you could put on the boat for shipping. I would have loved to see that in an upgrade setting, where you could buy more space or unlock it through points. Same goes for the amount of packages the boat brings in, or the amount of customers you can receive during the day. Especially when playing solo, these things would be nice. But, all in all, this is a great and wonderful game. A true masterpiece and refreshing game in a sea of bad simulators and boring puzzle games. Well done, developers.