A Concentrated Shot Of Slide Puzzling
Delivery of Us is a sliding puzzle game that features a pigeon, which doesn’t quite track. Sliding puzzles need a main character who slips on the ice, careening about and slamming into walls. But this pigeon can quite clearly fly. Just fly to the mailbox, pigeon. It’s right there.
Pigeons aren’t the most intelligent of creatures, so we will let it slide (ha). I also like to imagine the pigeon works for Evri, so it is contractually bound to slam the package into walls before delivering it.
Rats Of The Skies
In sliding puzzle game terms, Delivery of Us is pretty straightforward. There are no portals or enemies, no wrap-around Pac-Man mechanics. The height of complexity for Delivery of Us is a stop-pad – pausing your pigeon in its tracks – and a directional arrow which redirects them. There’s not much that needs you to learn or adapt.
That might sound one-dimensional if it wasn’t for a couple of house rules. First, the pigeon needs to reach several mailbox goals, not just one. Most sliding puzzle games opt for a single destination, but Delivery of Us tosses up to five at you at once.
Second, the mailboxes have a number floating above them. This is the maximum number of moves that the pigeon can make before the mailbox shuts. There’s a limit to how much your little Evri pigeon can muck about before they need to deliver the thing.
A Turn For The Better
We’ve complained about sliding games like Catnigma in the past. They are both easy and lacking a turn counter, which makes them benign. You can slide back and forth willy-nilly until you stumble on a win condition. We were curious to see whether a turn counter solved our problems.
The answer is ‘why, yes’. By putting the turn counter on the mailboxes rather than the level, Delivery of Us has had a bit of an epiphany. On the earlier levels, the turn counter acts as a helping hand. If there’s a ‘2’ above a mailbox, there’s a strong chance that you’ll need to head to it first. It reduces the permutations and offers welcome guidance.
In the later levels, though, it’s a fantastic sleight of hand. Just because a mailbox has the lowest turn counter, it doesn’t mean that it’s the first one you should visit. Delivery of Us has a cruel streak, and often makes the highest-number mailbox the one you should visit first if you want to solve the entire puzzle.
It’s so Machiavellian, that we often assumed the worst. We would take the least-attractive route deliberately, because we had learned – the hard way – what Delivery of Us was like. No, we’re not going to tag that mailbox right in front of us. It’s clearly a trap.
We suspect a level-wide turn-counter would have been overwhelming. It would have been the most obvious remedy for getting players to ration their moves, but I’m confident that the overall experience would have been worse. There would have been too many permutations and too much frustration.
Which is all to say that, bravo Delivery of Us, you’ve happened on a happy-medium between ease and difficulty. Other sliding puzzles should take note.
A Delivery That’s A Little Too Fast
What Delivery of Us doesn’t manage to nail, though, is duration. Thirty puzzles is not long at all, particularly when half of those levels act as onboarding of some form. Just as we were getting in the mindset of the level designers – “you sadists, we know what you’re thinking!” – Delivery of Us ended.
It’s been a while since we finished a game and audibly shouted “no!’. Because in all honesty, we can’t believe how quickly it all wrapped up. There could have been double the levels in Delivery of Us and I think we’d still have been complaining about its brevity. We’re verging on ‘feels like a demo’ territory here. You could point to the budget price, but even at £4.19, the number of puzzles feels abbreviated.
We’re disappointed because we care, of course. If we didn’t enjoy Delivery of Us, we would have been thankful it was over. We would have been laughing into the sunset with 1000G. But we were having a very good time indeed. The puzzles were expertly designed, the solutions were contrary and cruel, and we were in the zone. We were girding our loins for a few more mechanics to get delivered. But no, the parcel was ripped from our hands before we’d even opened it.
A Small Parcel with Big Puzzle Potential
Delivery of Us is one of the better sliding puzzle games we’ve played, but it’s also one of the shortest. It’s very much a small parcel rather than a large letter. You might need to ration yourself a few levels a day to spread the experience out a wee bit.
Important Links
You can buy Delivery of Us, optimised for Xbox Series X|S – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/delivery-of-us-xbox-series/9nscvpdss3q7
There’s an Xbox One version – https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/store/p/delivery-of-us-xbox-one/9nfxj1rrfgrj
Or one for Windows PC – https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/store/p/delivery-of-us-windows/9mssbkk191rj
