You've Got Cat Mail Co.

Intro

Well, this has been an interesting few months of reviews! I wanted to take a step back from the horror and intense action and sit down with something a little more cozy for this review. Cat Mail Co. is a simulation title where you are a cat, and you have mail to sort. It is developed by Maracas Studio and jointly published by Maracas Studio, and Gamersky Games.

Body

In this lighthearted adventure, your sights will be set on helping the poor citizens of Cats Island and the surrounding nations. You must take packages, weigh them, stamp them how you like, and complete small challenges with every package as the nights carry on. There is also a fun minigame at the end of each night where you must stack boxes based on their traits in a limited amount of space. You can do this with up to four other players.

Mechanically speaking, this game has a genuine amount of depth that requires you unlock that inner OCD side and organize everything. Throughout the progression, you'll unlock many different kinds of packages that require different rooms, stamps, and even pairings, because yes, even a package can have a soul mate. The game currently has several locations and affinities each package can have: hot, cold, dark, sunlight, soul mate, heavy, and fragile packages. This makes organization a fun challenge and balancing what packages need to be sent on the ship something you need to genuinely think about.

The graphics in this game are very simplistic, and that is fine. Not every game needs to have an ultra-realistic look to them, and not every game needs to be insanely cluttered with visuals. It has a personalized art style reminiscent of family friendly games that you would see on the Nintendo Switch, and it does the job well.

In my playthrough with a friend, we experienced minimal bugs that were patched out shortly through our playthrough. We nailed down an organization system that separated every location neatly and prioritized certain items when we were full. The game never punished us for that one poor package that we forgot about since the beginning of the game, it only encouraged us to make decisions based on how full each room was and what soulmate packages we could ship out first. The game also opens up as many windows for customers as you have for players, ensuring that everyone had something to do. The only downside to that system was that if both windows had shipments to go out, you needed to do each package individually. I do believe it may be better that way, as each package is able to be given the personal care it needs and automation would make this game far too easy, however, having a second machine to scan packages would have prevented us from getting in each other’s ways a few of the times.

Conclusion

In a calm but frantic turn of events, this game makes you use your brain in ways that other simulation games fail to do so. Even after finishing "story" mode, which basically consisted of freeing the previous trapped mail-cat, you are still met with a constant stream of challenges in balancing your packages and ensuring everything is in top shape going out every day. This gives this game an amount of replayability that isn't amazing, but gets a lot of hours of fun that, to be fair, I wasn't expecting. It is a pleasant surprise that deserves a solid 9 out of 10. To the developers of this game, I hope you continue the impressive work and perhaps make a sequel, DLC, or whatever is next for Cat Mail Co.