If you’re like me, you love a good game about organization. From A Little to the Left to Unpacking, there’s something just so satisfying about tidying up and finding innovative ways to fit way too many items into one small space.
Now we’ve got Packing Life, a game that plops you into what’s essentially an Amazon warehouse and lets you pack boxes to your heart’s content. Unfortunately for cozy gamers, though, Packing Life fumbles the fundamentals with an unpolished story mode and wonky camera movements, showing life really is better outside the box.
The gist of Packing Life is simple: You have one of three box sizes and must arrange items in a way that they’ll fit inside. You grab an item from a shipping container, scan it, and then place it in the box. You can rotate both the items and the box, and shift the camera angle into a top-down view, a mechanic that greatly helps you find the proper angle for all the knick-knacks a customer has ordered. There’s an area on the workbench where all the packing takes place that can be used to temporarily store items while you’re rearranging the box’s contents. To top it all off, you also have a label printer where you must print labels and affix them to the package before shipping it off.
Your HUD shows you what box size you’ll need and which labels to attach to it. If you fail to put the proper sticker on, like forgetting the fragile warning for a package containing glass objects, you won’t get credit for the package. The HUD also shows a clock to help you keep track of time.
In Packing Life’s story, you play as Lily, a university student working at a shipping company for some extra cash. The narrative is told primarily through the shadows of Lily and her overeager boss, where they discuss the job and the happenings outside of it through dialogue boxes. At the end of each level, or shift, you get paid money, which you can then use to decorate your workspace. Though this feature makes sense in the context of a video game, we all know no college student would spend the few bucks they have to decorate the part-time job they probably hate. Packing Life is constantly trying to sell you the idea that Lily loves her job, with journal entries featuring coworkers we never meet and notes about how much Lily appreciates them.
Before each shift, you’ll talk to your boss to get the day’s overview, but the dialogue often feels disjointed. Your boss often abruptly pivots the subject to issue an overenthusiastic comment about the day’s work. The shadows are also quite strange, with hands coming from places they shouldn’t or your employer striking a superhero pose when rambling about the day’s agenda. Overall, the story feels unpolished and unnecessary, and I found myself skipping through most of it.
The worst part about Packing Life, though, is its jank. From an overactive camera to limitations on the extra desk space, the game often feels like it’s tripping over itself. When moving an item from the box to the side of the desk, the camera frequently overshoots where your cursor is and moves to the other area too quickly, forcing you to drag your mouse back. When you’re racing the clock (and even when you aren’t), it’s a minor gameplay issue that quickly becomes a major annoyance. There were also times when I tried to place items in the extra desk space and couldn’t because the game considered them “too tall,” even though it’s an open tabletop. If it’s inside the box, sure—I get it. But not letting me place an item on an open desk is just frustrating.
This is made infinitely worse by the fact that you can’t see what items you’re grabbing when you first pick them out from the shipping container. That means you could pack a box with nine out of ten items, only for the tenth item to be the largest of the bunch, requiring you to take everything out of the box to rearrange it. With the constraints on the open space, you’re now having to play a second game of how to get everything out of the box and onto the extra space! Though this didn’t happen often, at one point, I thought I was going to have to reset simply because I didn’t think I would be able to get everything out of the box to make enough room.
Packing Life might scratch the organization itch for an hour or two. But with how unpolished the gameplay feels, it’s a tough one to recommend. Honestly, you’d probably get the same experience grabbing a random box at home and stuffing it with whatever’s on your desk—and you’d save $10.
