Easy Delivery Co. Review (Xbox Series X|S & PC)

It took me a while to figure out what Easy Delivery Co. was trying to show me. I just couldn’t put my finger on it. In one moment, I’d be driving back and forth between a florist and a pizzeria, traveling less than, I don’t know, fifty yards, oblivious to what the point of anything was. I didn’t get it. I had a flatbed truck, a seemingly barren mountaintop town, and an endless list of jobs to complete. But that was all that I saw—a means to an end, or a pointless expedition that had little to give me other than a mirror into the depths of old-school PSX. I wanted to love it. But there was something missing—an ingredient that I couldn’t help but think would make a mundane chore a gripping thrill ride into the fog-addled boroughs of a Silent Hill–like town. Fifteen minutes later, it hit me like a freight train. Easy Delivery Co. wasn’t just a dull driving experience; it was an onion with countless layers that needed to be torn apart to be enjoyed.

If I hadn’t of stuck around in Easy Delivery Co. for longer than fifteen minutes, then I might have had a hard time recommending it. The beginning told me all that I needed to know without the usual drawn-out jargon or lengthy tutorials. I had a truck, a town, and the simple task of delivering items back and forth between stores in a dead zone, with a job list that, to my knowledge, had no ending. I’d make a couple of bucks, and I’d take on yet another job, usually to do the same delivery. It wasn’t like Death Stranding; the items I was delivering had no purpose or beneficial value whatsoever. Instead, it was a couple of pizzas, or a bouquet of flowers. I didn’t understand it.

Twenty minutes later, I heard it — a faint whistle creeping out from behind a thin veil of fog. A traveler welcomed me, and told me that, if I handed him an energy drink from the nearby vending machine, he would add new locations to my map. He then told me that I’d need to conserve my energy for the journey ahead. Again, I just couldn’t put two and two together. But I knew, alright, that the deliveries were about to get a lot tougher. I loaded up my truck, and I set out for a town on the far corner of the mountain, blissfully unaware that the ever-elusive “thrill ride” was a lot closer than I could’ve anticipated. Easy Delivery Co. had me in a chokehold, and I couldn’t seem to escape from it.

Beneath the mindless act of volleying back and forth between desolate stores and cloaked dwellings, Easy Delivery Co. gave me a lot to think about. It wasn’t just the process of balancing items on a poxy flatbed truck that was a problem; it was the world and all that it had to offer. Before long it felt that ordinary citizens had a lot more to hide, and that the more I looked, the more I realized that it wasn’t an ordinary world with ordinary folks, but an unsettling diorama of ashen streets and peculiar places. By no means was it a scene fit for a horror flick, but it had something that made me feel, I don’t know, uneasy. The world had all sorts of secrets, and I couldn’t help but bend over backwards to unravel them.

Don’t get me wrong, the experience itself was rather straightforward: accept an order, pick up said order, and deliver it to the appropriate location. You earn next to minimum wage per order, and then use that cash to upgrade your truck, either with snow tires to cushion your steering and prevent unwanted spills, bumpers to keep you from jackknifing off of an icy verge, or energy drinks and other cosmetics to keep your stamina intact and your body temperature above freezing point. And that’s kind of all it was: earning pockets of spare change and making small but critical improvements to a truck for the sake of taking on bigger jobs and traveling vast distances. There was a storyline somewhere between all of these upgrades, but it didn’t really make a difference in the grand scheme of things. No, it was the brief moments that made the world worth visiting—the oddball scripts, the eccentric characters, and the stores that had no place in a bitter climate.

Of course, the visuals took me straight back to the golden age of PSX shoddiness. It didn’t immediately take me aback — but it coerced me in another way. The janky physics; the god-awful camera work; and the wooden controls, for example, all brought me back to my childhood. At first I couldn’t help but hate it. But then, the more I wheedled into old habits, the more I began to appreciate the simple things. It might have felt a little broken, but that was the point. I was just glad that the driving wasn’t terrible. Frustrating, but not terrible. The upgrades helped a lot with that.

Verdict

Easy Delivery Co. is a game that you either get or you don’t. It takes just fifteen minutes to decide whether or not it’ll be a journey worth taking or one that you won’t want to purposely subject yourself to for longer than the first batch of routine deliveries. For me, I’m glad I stuck around long enough to see what lurked beyond the veil of its seemingly innocent town. I can’t say I was ever amazed by it all, but it certainly had a lot to showcase during the interlude and the final stages of the venture.

If you’re all for quirky concepts that pay tribute to the shoddiness of PSX cult classics, then Easy Delivery Co. ought to come across as an ideal way for you to lean into old habits. It might not be the best example of a great driving game, but with a lot of eccentric characters and secrets there for you to unravel, it ought to keep you thoroughly entwined with the world for a handful of hours, give or take.