Easy Delivery Co: hard labor comfort. Digital snow. Part 1

It just so happens that winter holidays are for those who need winter holidays, and in the past serene weeks, many people have worked tirelessly to ensure these holidays. We are talking about simple workers of capitalism – couriers. In the game Easy Delivery Co, we are invited to get into the fluffy, low-poly skin of such a hard worker, and we will talk not only about valuable orders and low wages from a caring corporation, but also about a completely new moral problem that is closer than it seems.

Winter is the perfect time for home video gaming. As a big fan of all kinds of synergy, during this period I want to bring a winter fairy tale to the space behind your monitors. And so that it more or less corresponds to the subject of our Rock Magazine, of course. In this part of the cycle, we will talk about driving on snowy roads.

Dream Job

Congratulations! You have been hired as a freight forwarder driver. Your task is to deliver the goods as soon as possible. And the fact that it’s easy you can freeze to death if you go outside, and you have paws at all, it doesn’t change anything!

Cheer up with a branded energy drink from Easy Co or drink a cup of instant coffee, because sleep and rest are for weaklings, and we only need staunch, dedicated employees at Easy Delivery Co. And there are absolutely no navigation systems for such dedicated workers. We are sure that you will have enough road signs to find your way!

Starting as a sweet satire on corporate madness, Easy Delivery Co quickly throws you into the deserted snow-covered streets of urban-type settlements with the same panels. You should not be too fascinated by their appearance – this is not happening in your native doomerian space. Take, for example, the fact that your pickup truck is right–hand drive, and you prefer jungle and breakcore from the musical accompaniment – very typical British subgenres of drum-n-bass. Although, quite possibly, all this is one huge nod towards the consoles of the nineties, when these particular subgenres were very fond of being used as a soundtrack.

Wheel Joy

It is very pleasant to drive in this game, and this is the first step of its charm, without which everything else would not work. The point here is finely tuned and completely unrealistic physics. You’re flying like crazy, but at the same time the cargo has its own very actual weight, and some bumps or driveways that the grader is crying over will feel exactly like obstacles.

The physics of cargo deserves a special moment, as it tries to fall out of the trunk in a funny way during sharp turns. Funnily enough, the loss of almost all cargo is not subject to a fine, because your company prioritizes speed over safety. The main thing is not to drop everything at all. Of course, you can secure the load with duct tape, but at your own expense.

The fact that you need to plan the route yourself, as well as consumables in the form of gasoline at a horse price tag and the need to maintain the desired level of energy of the character by drinking all kinds of stimulants — all this and many more similar semi-random little things make the game very attractive. It is unlikely that you will want to go through it binge, but you will definitely want to launch it periodically to deliver a couple of orders to cute animals.

Retro-pacification

In reviews, this game is very often attributed to the Cozy subgenre, that is, cozy and non-stressful games, for relaxation, so to speak. The most prominent examples of this subgenre are Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing. Well, you could already see from the screenshots and the description that everything here is not so simple. Because despite the cute characters and the real comfort that this game brings, it is unlikely that semi-slave labor as a concept is something peaceful. And the characters here are not so simple. They’re kind of weird.

However, the game design of the game itself makes us recall many moments from the Nintendo games, more specifically from the Nintendo 64 console, where the Animal Crossing series first appeared. This is the unexpected and highly complex depth of some game decisions.

Do you want the music to be uninterrupted? Fix the radio towers. How can I guess that this can and should be done? Try and experiment! Was the road blocked by a pile of logs? Make a fire out of them – a gasoline lighter will be enough for these purposes. These tasks look incredibly trivial in words if you explain them like this and put a marker in the right place. But in the game, everything is not so obvious, and this gives the very atmosphere of exploring virtual worlds, left in barefoot childhood with kinescope TVs and exchanging cartridges with classmates.

The Elephant in Silent Hill

Maybe stop ignoring him! There is an obvious cultural code in modern game design: “if something uses the graphic style of Play Station 1, it’s horror.” Moreover, the very horror that is not “horror”, but “disturbing”, like truecrame videos, in which, under low-fi ambient, the author, as a rule, is much younger than all the events described by him, reads out all the fears of the world in a low voice. It turns out to be a kind of relaxing anxiety, which is very pleasant to fall asleep to. So that you can definitely find yourself in the embrace of comfortable nightmares, which my beloved Lucky’12 sang about. Here, too, with this characteristically gray snow mist, everything is very obvious, although immersed in elegant details.

The elegance lies in the Lynchefrost approach, where for the time being you need to personally find inconsistencies in the seemingly flawless provincial reality. Why do the characters periodically freeze? Why does everything in these territories belong to one corporation? What’s in those boxes, anyway?

The late David Lynch was very appreciative of digital technology at the time, and he would have liked the challenges posed by digital horror. In the best traditions of the deceased, spoilers for this work don’t really matter. But, just in case, spoiler alert! Everything that happens in the game is an abandoned digital simulation that was created for educational purposes. And now the orphaned children are experiencing problems in the world from which the demiurges have left. A captain without a ship, that’s it. Our will can solve this problem in several ways, with varying degrees of fatality.

In addition to the narrative core, there is also the feeling of that damned old toy from kripipast. In the spirit of “Ben the Drowned man” or “every copy of Mario 64 is personalized.” Yes, the examples are intentionally from an area that none of the Russian speakers have ever seen before: Nintendo horror, so to speak. This is very noticeable in the factory location, where some intangible force from the depths of the frozen lake is not allowed, and, of course, in the concrete limbo, where the cat goes after death.

Easy Delivery Co is an extremely unusual project, refreshing like the cold winter sun. It makes you think that even in many layers of detention, you can get a simple personal pleasure from life. And it doesn’t matter how real and free this very life is. I highly recommend completing the videogame during this or any other winter season. Have a nice day!