…And so the thick snow feels like a sweet variant of obscuration: an invitation to go make my own footprints. The signs are blanketed to invisibility or missing entirely, though I wouldn’t know the difference in weather this insistent. But: Easy Delivery Co.’s map is very good. And by very good, I mean it tells me slightly less than what I want to know at all times.
I visit the cat at the flower shop to pick up my first delivery, and the shopkeeper animal stutters and tells me: “I’m not talking very well these days”. And my mind should go to, y’know, a thousand ice cream stick joke-pithy character quirks in suchlike games, employed to add unimposing texture, but instead I am here: this cat does not talk very well these days. The cat stutters. The cat has difficulty getting words out.
And so my mind flies straight past the idea that this is, realistically, a boilerplate shopkeeper quirk, and goes straight to a memory of my dad telling me, as a young teenager, to be careful around town. To avoid fights. I think maybe I’d told him I’d got in an argument with a stranger. In return: a story about a “a lad who used to come in the shop” for years but got in some mischief, lost badly, and “isn’t the same anymore”. I still remember how visibly sad it made my dad to think of a boy who’d had part of his mind stolen by violence. I bring it up because this animal – this chibi animal who just gave me a plant to deliver – reeks of tragedy. Maybe it’s the weather – it’s louder than anything else here.
Or maybe they had a stroke, I think. So, what I’m saying is: Easy Delivery Co. creates the sort of world – presents the sort of space – that makes me seriously consider whether a chibi animal has survived something awful. That’s the Steam quote if you want it.
The trees are dead and the streets are dead and the birds sound plucky and knowledgeable, if a little burnt out by routine. The plant in the back of my truck is green and vibrant. I place it in the correct location in the street. I receive some money. I expect, in those lingering few seconds, another friendly animal to pop up. “You made your first delivery. Congratulations!”. A joke. A tip to help me with my next delivery; one that will be comfortingly simple but with just the slightest dash of additional friction.
Instead: the friction finds me where I stand. A warning sign. Seek Shelter. The snow is a villain. I rush back to my truck and wait for the screen to thaw out. It’s about halfway through the next job when I realise that there’s no one else on the road. Which is good, because all I can see in my rear mirror are pizza boxes. Bird song. Tyres. Rushing wind. Clattering wooden bridges.
Night becomes day. No sleep. Only stimulants. I travel a few minutes out of my way to empty my inventory of drained cans. I briefly consider travelling back and forth between the truck to better simulate the process of scooping around underneath the seats for empties. It’s too cold, though. Too cold for roleplay. Too cold for hijinks. Too cold, perhaps, to grin widely for fear of tasting whatever salty, frozen runoff is coming out of my stupid cat nose.
Tutorials are accessed through a menu organised like a cluttered desktop and the writing is flavoured with that “heinous intrusions on self and soul stated as employee wellbeing” CorpoLOL style you know and love. I think it’s probably an integral part of the game’s texture, although I’m not sure the point needed to put on so finely. It works for me, though.
How’s that old one go again? “What’s your dream job?”. “I don’t dream of labour, thanks”.
Really? I do. That’s why I’m here.
I dream of labours so fascinating and complex in their minutiae yet so easily discernible in what separates success from failure that I never have time to think again. I dream of labours that consume me so utterly that they seep into my dreams and I dream of dreaming of dreaming of labour. I dream of a labour worth pulling every muscle in my body for; a labour in stasis; umasterable and unending, real enough to leave me alone forever to hurt in comfort with it.
So do you, of course, which is why we’re here delivering plants. Although the PR reckons this one last about five hours total, so maybe we’ll be left seeking. Still, what an expansive and incisive small space this is. The snow is so thick outside. There are so many layers bearing down on me.
