Packing Life Review - More Frustrating Than Satisfying
In my late teens and early twenties, I worked in the service department at Coles. I might not have been the most personable service team member, but I was efficient. My special skill was quickly knowing which items would fit perfectly into a bag, and I’ve maintained that mundane superpower even a decade later, Tetris-ing items into my wheely granny bag at the self-checkout with unsettling competence.
I say this not to brag, but to explain that Packing Life should be my kind of game. Looking at a selection of items and figuring out how to fit them into a delivery box is the sort of repetitive, satisfying task that I thought would bring me calm, akin to something like PowerWash Simulator.
Unfortunately, Packing Life doesn’t quite deliver (pun intended) on its promise. Games that are focused on creating a satisfying experience for their players have a difficult task: they have to feel really good because anything that takes away from that gamefeel also takes away from the game’s core purpose. It means that little things—like imperfect grid placement, lurching camera movements, and unintuitive keyboard controls—have a more significant impact than they might have in a different genre.
I found myself feeling frustrated when playing Packing Life, more than satisfied, especially when I was trying to play on the timed mode. I wanted to work quickly and feel accomplished, but the controls made me feel clumsy and slow. Thankfully, there’s both a timed mode and an infinite mode, although other accessibility features are quite lacking in this game.
Packing Life is mostly about packing boxes, but it also attempts to contextualise the mechanics within a simple story. The player-character is Lily, a young woman who has travelled to the city to study. She has decided to work at a factory for a month before the semester to help her pay the bills, and her supervisor is strangely supportive of this, despite knowing he is training someone who intends to leave within a few weeks. It might be fine if you got to learn this gradually, but most of Lily’s backstory is told through an exposition dump on the first in-game day.
I appreciate the game’s attempt to justify why you are packing boxes, but the narrative is a bit heavy-handed and, in some ways, does the rest of the game a disservice. For example, Lily talks a lot about how hard it is to afford living in the city, but then at the beginning of each day, you can choose to use your salary to buy items and decorate your packing station. You sometimes have to put some money aside for bills, like $40 for groceries, but these amounts feel extremely low considering a decorative coffee mug costs $140. I love it when satisfying games incorporate ways to decorate and customise the world, but it’s hard to justify spending money on these expensive details if I’m imagining that I’m Lily, a student who is trying to save up money so she can pay her rent once the semester starts.
Throughout the game, sometimes Lily is also reminded of events from her life or things that she cares about based on the items she is packing into boxes. These memories suddenly pop up on the screen and interrupt your attempt to get into the flow of rotating, moving, and placing items. Overall, I think some more thought could be given to the experience that this game wants players to have, and making sure that the mechanics and narrative serve that experience rather than detracting from it.
None of this is to say that Packing Life isn’t full of potential. There’s a good core game here; it just needs a little bit of love. The art in this game is exceptional, with many thoughtful details included on the packing station and the items you work with. The objects assigned to each box seem manually determined rather than random, as each delivers an ideal level of challenge in terms of the space leftover, as well as offering some environmental storytelling as you try to guess who the recipient of that parcel might be. Packing Life is more successful with this emergent narrative than its dialogue.
If a game about organising boxes full of chocolates and shoes sounds like a pleasant afternoon escape for you, Packing Life is worth a purchase. But if you think some clunky mechanics might distract you too much, it might be worth waiting for a patch.
Packing Life was reviewed on PC with code kindly supplied by the Publisher.
