Cosy games that take some of the most mundane and monotonous jobs and “cosy them up” are an interesting breed. They have to straddle the balance of being interesting, whilst not feeling like the player is completing chores. Ship, Inc. is a packaging game that has rounded edges, a wandering cat, and a lot of parcels to pack for hundreds of customers. Can you make the hell of working at a not-Amazon warehouse cosy? It’s debatable…
At the beginning, you’ll have access to a few companies as distributors, and they’ll send you customer orders to pack in a suitably sized box, with peanuts included. You’ll then seal the box with tape, pop an address number sticker on it and send it on its way. As you earn money and start to unlock more contracts and level them up, you’ll gain access to more types of products to pack. Fragile products, like glass vases, require bubble wrap and a fragile sticker. Batteries need a chemical sticker. Other items need a keep dry sticker, and there are even radioactive items to pack. Get the right products in the box, with the right stickers on the first try and you’ll earn a decent commission. Wrong products will mean you’ll need to rip the box open to repack and resticker it. Forgetting bubble wrap or a hazard sticker will result in financial penalties. To mix things up, some orders have a rush job time limit for a monetary bonus, and others are gifts and require a gift card. Occasionally, you may also get a fraudulent order to report to the police for a reward. Sometimes items arrive dirty or broken, and you’ll need to give them a quick scrub with your mouse or put them back together as a 5-piece jigsaw.
Whatever you are packing, the mechanics stay the same, and this is where my main niggle with Ship, Inc. comes into play. The game lets you overlap some products, but not others, and often shows the player what packing is valid or not by fading out items that won’t fit. The problem is that this visual cue is incorrect about 50% of the time. When trying to pack items into the most economical box (as bigger boxes cost you more) you’ll spend ages fiddling around with seemingly valid moves that the game doesn’t like. Sometimes it’ll reorientate products to say “this might work” and then it still doesn’t. Playing for efficiency is quite frustrating, and after the first 2 hours, I gave up that approach altogether. Instead, I just ordered big boxes and used them for 80% of all orders. It was less cost-efficient, but my mental health was much improved. This may sound like I am harping on about a single control issue, but Ship, Inc’s gameplay involves doing this move 90% of the time. It should be the most watertight part of the game and interaction design, and it is not working as intended.
The goal of the game is to earn $100,000 to buy your house, and so long as you don’t make lots of mistakes, it is quite difficult to lose in the original game mode. There is a hardcore mode that adds in timers and heavy penalties, but I didn’t spend long with that mode because of the control issues previously mentioned. Alongside saving to buy your home, you can upgrade your inventory of boxes, peanuts, packing mats, and tape colours. You can also get a pet bed to stop the annoying cat from hogging a random box. All of these customisations are nice, but where I wanted more variety was in the products I was shipping. There are some funny special orders, but they occur very infrequently. There is a lack of awkwardly shaped objects to deal with, or consideration given to not pack radioactive objects with groceries. With more variety or special conditions, the monotonous gameplay would have sparkled a bit more. It isn’t terrible by any stretch, but by the time I bought my house, I didn’t want to continue much beyond that.
Ship, Inc. tries to make a fundamentally monotonous task cosy, and it succeeds to a point. Sadly, it is also quite fiddly to achieve the right outcome with its miscommunications around legal moves. I feel like a patch or two could really make this game sparkle, and there are hints of future updates coming to the game within the menus themselves. I’ll wait to see if those updates arrive, and if they do, see if they improve the fiddly control issue.
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