Paperman: Adventure Delivered

I genuinely wanted to root for this one. Four postal workers with cartoony paper-craft designs, a dragon villain who watches the evening news, three themed worlds to scour for golden letters - on paper (no pun intended), Paperman: Adventure Delivered has the skeleton of a charming weekend collectathon that families could couch-co-op through together. The premise is disarmingly sweet, the visual identity is distinct enough that the characters could carry a better game, and the local split-screen support for up to four players is the kind of feature that almost never shows up in small indie platformers. I respect the ambition here, sincerely. The problem is that the controls undermine everything else with remarkable consistency. Jumps feel simultaneously weightless and leaden - a combination that sounds impossible but is very much achievable when the physics engine refuses to commit to any coherent movement model. Running direction from an analog stick reads more like a suggestion the game considers before doing something adjacent. Combat against the dragon's minions compounds the issue: hit detection is unreliable, enemies give almost no feedback when struck, and you will frequently be unable to tell whether your attack landed at all. The camera compounds all of this - it clips through geometry, locks up in puzzle sections without warning, and resets to center at the worst moments when you are trying to scan above or below for a hidden collectible. A camera reset button is not present, which becomes a genuine problem. Character-swapping is where the collectathon structure should shine, and the four postal heroes do at least have distinct abilities. Paperman throws letters and teleports short distances to them. Express dashes across breakable bridges. Scrolly glides on air currents to reach high platforms. Carl, the cardboard box, shoves heavy objects. The puzzle design built around these abilities is actually the game's strongest element - simple block-pushing and wind-tube activation sequences that work fine when the physics cooperate. The catch is that swapping characters requires backtracking to mailbox checkpoints, so retrieving a collectible gated behind the wrong character means retracing the same ground repeatedly. With reportedly over a thousand collectibles spread across three worlds and no per-item map tracking, that backtracking accumulates into a significant friction tax. The three worlds themselves - a tropical Manyfaced Island, a desert pyramid zone called Valley of Sand, and a parkour-heavy Winding Peak - have personality in concept that the execution does not fully realise. Patch support has been sparse since launch, and community reports suggest that basic issues like camera preference saving and controller input triggering unintended split-screen mode have persisted well past release. Steam shows a mixed user rating from a small sample, and professional critics across multiple outlets landed firmly in negative territory. The honest takeaway: the foundation here could have produced something genuinely worthwhile for families seeking a lighthearted N64-style romp, and the co-op intent is real. But the gap between concept and execution is wide enough that only the most patient players - or very young children who have not yet calibrated their platformer expectations - are likely to find enough value to push through.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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