I don’t envy posties. Tom The Postgirl looks all happy to be starting their new job as a postgirl but I can’t think why. You have to get up early in the morning, for one thing. Rain or shine. When I get up at six in the morning for work, I’m basically a walking corpse. If I knocked on your door to deliver a parcel, you’d get the fright of your life. Then in the olden days, you had to wear a heavy sack on your shoulder. It turned your spine into one big, painful curve. That’s to say nothing of dogs. Personally, I don’t want my fingers chewed off for the crime of delivering your gas bill.
Still, Tom The Postgirl found a rather novel way of getting through the day: pure, unfiltered chaos. Starting from peeping into windows and ending with sawing a tree with a chainsaw so it falls on a bloke. Mind you the bloke already had a tree on him. Which I think means it isn’t a crime? I’ll get back to you on that one. Either way, it was quite funny and that’s most of the appeal of Tom The Postgirl. It has a wild sense of humour, constantly pulling up new, disconnected things to make me laugh. It’s a small package overall, but one that put a broad grin on my face.
Early In The Morning…
The first thing that impressed me about Tom The Postgirl was the art style. It’s the perfect representation of the game’s tone. Comical, with this little edge of creepiness on the fringes. Hell, the menu has Tom peering through a window like the villain in a slasher film. For the most part though, it’s light and cartoony. Tom herself is in a bright red coat, which helps her stand out against the grayscale world. The animations are deliciously fluid, with the right sort of bounciness you’d expect from this sort of thing. Tom gains most of her character through these animations, giving her an air of mischief. I certainly don’t like the look on her face when she has a pair of scissors.
Tom is a trainee (at first anyway) postgirl. She collects a sack of parcels from her boss, then knocks on doors to deliver them. On the way, she treads on a strange alien device but you shouldn’t worry about that too much. Once she reaches a house, she’s free to bumble around, squishing flowers and peeping through windows. This is where the humour comes in, as the inhabitants of this place are all flavours of weird. From amusing weird, like a horse standing in front of a ‘cow’ sign (with a big censor bar); to naughty weird, like a chicken and a woman rolling in the hay; to creepy weird, like the conjoined twins who saw a dog in half. I love it. It’s all done without dialogue too, just constant bombardments of humorous nonsense.
When The Day Is Dawning…
The humour gives some characterisation to Tom too. At the start of Tom The Postgirl, she’s reasonably respectable. Window peeping aside. But she gets gradually more chaotic towards the end. Some of this is guided by gameplay, but it is limited. We can choose to open some of the parcels rather than deliver them, for instance, which changes the various things we can look at. Overall though, most of the gameplay is spent wandering around looking for certain interactable spots, so that Tom The Postgirl can roll out its latest joke. I’m in two minds about that. On the one hand, I always hope for more involved gameplay, but on the other hand, it is a great delivery service for silly gags.
What made it come down on the side of positivity, however, was a couple of added bits. There are side quests, for one thing, that rely on picking up specific items. So to get ready for a church rave, you need an oversized glove, a pair of mismatched shoes and a slug, which you then use a moustache. It adds a little optional element to things, which is good. Then at the very end it gives you a little analysis about how you played. Whether you smushed all the plants, or kept to the path, or what have you, with associated achievements. So there’s some replayability there. I think these touches keep Tom The Postgirl from feeling like a comedy pop-up book.
Tom The Postgirl – Perfect Postie Comedy
I also like that Tom The Postgirl has a story going on, despite being dialogue-free. Without spoiling anything, things quickly go even more bananas towards the end, and you begin to learn why Tom acts like she does. It’s appropriately silly. All the people you deliver to have micro-stories too. You can peep through their windows before and after delivering, to get a sense of what was in the package. You even return to their houses later. I love that, it threads these stories throughout Tom’s story, all of which are learned by being a peeping… I just got that.
As a final note though, it’s worth mentioning that Tom The Postgirl is a little on the short side. I beat it in around two to three hours, and I was very much taking my time with it. Personally, I think that’s an alright length for something like this. Too much longer and the jokes might’ve worn a little thin. But if you’re the type to tie your wallet to your watch, then it might be a bit on the short side for ten quid. But I’d certainly recommend picking it up, particularly if you’re in the mood for a slightly risqué comedy title. Just bear in mind, it might make you keep a closer eye on your own postie. Particularly if you notice them peeping in through a second story window.
