Mothergamer Plays Mail Time

 *Note: I received this game for free on Nintendo Switch for my honest review. Thank you to Stride PR for the game code.

Right from the start Mail Time shows itself to be a cute and cozy game especially with the character creator. You can adjust the skin tone, choose different hairstyles, a cute mushroom hat, change the color of your outfit, pick a backpack, and a style of glider for getting around the forest. All of it is adorable. 

Creating my cute Mail Scout. 

Once that's done the story begins with parking the cute mail truck in a spot in the forest. Your character is a Mail Scout in training and it's their first day on the job. Your supervisor Janet tells you that your first task is to deliver a letter to someone named Greg, but there's no address and no directions. Janet tells you it's up to you as the Mail Scout to figure this out using all your important scout abilities because you're not an official Scout yet. You have to prove yourself by delivering mail and earning Mail Scout patches. This seems like a strange way to handle job orientation, but your Scout is optimistic that they can do it so off you go into the forest to handle this task. 

Off to deliver some mail! 

With delivering the mail with only name, this means you have to talk to all the local residents and ask them if they know the person to get hints about who they are as well as clues to their location so you can find them and deliver their mail. They have their own problems too that only you a Mail Scout can solve. The majority of it is a mix of fetch quests and delivering letters and items for them. It's a smart way to get you to explore this big forest with your small Scout. 

Cedar needs our help delivering some mail. 

I love the artwork for Mail Time. It shows immediately how big the forest is and how tiny our Mail Scout is, but it's done in such a fantastic way with bright colors and whimsical art that remind me of a children's storybook. It's perfect for a game like Mail Time and I enjoyed exploring everywhere. The area itself is not very big, but it does encourage you to peek in every nook and corner because you never know what you will find. This is where your glider comes in because you can climb up very high among the trees and some of the hills to discover some things and villagers on your journey. In some of these spots you can use the glider to gently sail on the wind to get to a location. It's another detail that adds to the coziness and whimsy of the game. 

Exploring high up among the trees. 

There's all kinds of different tasks to do, not all of them are deliver mail oriented. Some ask you to do things such as find some gold coins for a kind of greedy cat or help a hamster have a perfect picnic. For each task completed you get a Mail Scout patch which you get to keep in a cute sticker book. Sometimes it wasn't obvious where to go and I would have to talk to the villagers to figure out the hints and clues. There's no map in Mail Time either which I feel is a bit odd, but because the area is small I was able to backtrack easily and get to where I needed to go. 

Mail Scout patches, gotta collect them all! 

The writing for Mail Time is well done. The banter is funny and the wordplay is smart. They can also be very sweet with some of the storytelling like my personal favorite, a mom loving her children's drawings they made for her and talking about how proud she is that they're so good at the things they love. Mail Time is not a very long game, I finished it in about two hours. When I got to the end it felt like saying goodbye to old friends and it was lovely and joyful just like the entire game itself. It's a wonderful relaxed experience that tells a nice story with memorable characters, cute art, and I enjoyed all of it.

Chatting with a cute capybara. 

*Mail Time is available on the following platforms: PC (Steam, Epic), Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4, and Playstation 5

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