Packing Life - The Amazon Warehouse Experience - Review
Pack products in Packing Life, a capitalist hellscape puzzle sim developed and published by Aroko Game Studio.
This native game runs great on PCs running Linux (tested on CachyOS) and Steam Deck, without needing Proton. You can see a video of the gameplay I captured, without commentary (but you can pinpoint the moments of internal screaming and desperation!).
I went in for the cozy and relaxing atmosphere that the store page demonstrates. And don’t get me wrong, the game delivers that. But then I made the mistake to play the timed mode, and the game flipped upside down.
Relaxing
At first glance, what attracted me to the game was the similarities with Unpacking. Well, more like the opposite. Unpacking unlocked the genre of chilling and organizing stuff for me. But they could not be more different (besides packing vs. unpacking).
In Packing Life, you work in a warehouse packing products into a box. A bin comes in full of products, you pick the right size of the box, fit the products in the box, close, seal, tag it and ship it.
It is quite fun and relaxing to rotate the products to find the perfect spot for them. The game assists a bit with a grid, and a red or green product shadow so you can see if its placement will fit.
The challenge comes from the fact that the bin is darkened, so you never know what product you are grabbing next, the product comes in a random orientation, and you have limited space to organize everything. Sometimes you have the perfect assembly inside the box, and you get a product that forces you to remove the whole thing and start again (you have a little extension of the table to help with that).
The story about you is not told through gameplay like in Unpacked (I think this was the main difference for me). Here, before each day of labour, there is a small conversation. You keep a journal of clippings with memories. And every so often there is a little personal remark about a product you are packing, like a shade of lipstick or a toy you got when you were a kid. The packing itself tells more about your customers. But this is not a bad thing. I like to let my imagination go, and think about the birthday they are preparing, or a student getting ready for school, or this person is clearly going to resell these 10 pairs of boots.
I liked those “customer stories” and how I discovered then more than whatever was going during the daily chat. But it can get a bit repetitive, and you think you might have packed that box before. It would add a lot if I could see the name on the shipping label. Maybe that student graduated and now can afford more from the new job. Maybe the 10 pairs of shoes order is for some velvet worm.
And then…, then I tried the timed mode.
Timed Mode Hell
Everything I held nice and dear vanished.
The coworker filling the bin upstream? I hate them. What a terrible job. I am surprised the products are not broken when they arrive here. The customer taste in products? Who buys coffee from Amazon? The relaxing music? You know how they tell you to never put your favourite music as alarm? Yeah, that.
You see, it was not their fault. But the stress of the time and getting your payment docked for anything. Used too much bubble wrap: salary reduction. Not enough bubble wrap: salary reduction. Took a bathroom break: salary reduction. Had to work overtime: you know, the most dystopic thing, salary reduction instead of extra pay. And Day 3 is when the rent is due.
The stress builds with the clock ticking, with the weird order of things from the bin, and you start making mistakes: you grab the wrong box, or forget to put the right tag (and they dock your pay), you forget there is a bird’s-eye view, despite the gigantic icon on your screen.
There is a cute cat that I was petting all the time. But in the timed mode, I am not sure if I was stress stroking it or punching it with my clicks. It could be either, and it was not its fault. Poor cat, I am so sorry for hurting you. Thank you for being there with me.
Oh, and you can customize your workplace. You have to pay for the things to put in a billionaire’s warehouse. Carpets, posters, and other things that cost 3 times my rent. And since I like to fantasize and role-play, I only invested in a big empty vase and a mug. You know for what.
I shared a long play with no commentary at the start, while I don’t speak, you can clearly see the moments I die inside a bit. But I also started noticing some problems of accessibility and design because of the pace I had to do things.
The default keyboard bindings feel a bit odd if you are used to playing city builders or strategy games that you can rotate stuff. The accessibility part is that there is no way to remap those bindings.
The table you work on is not that intuitive. I had issues moving products from the bin to the box, or to the table extension. Sometimes I would zoom out to help but that just ensued chaos. As in the zoomed out view I could not hold a product, you can only open/close the box and prepare it for shipping, not for moving products around.
The same issues are also present in the relaxed mode, but they are clearly exacerbated in the time mode.
Steam Deck, and Controls
The game has full controller support and works well on Steam Deck, but for some reason analog controls did not work on the PC. The little hand was blinking, and it was hard to select things. If you have a controller with a trackpad, like the DualSense, you can use that instead to move things around.
The default profile for the Steam Deck comes with the left pad working as D-pad, something this game does not use much, and you already have a D-pad for the 2 buttons necessary. So I switched it to behave like a joystick to help me fine tune the location where I am packing the items.
Because of the lack of keyboard bindings settings, I enjoyed using the controller a bit more. It was easier to rotate with the shoulder buttons and to fine tune the position with the analogs than with the mouse.
The game is very power hungry on the Steam Deck, it clocked over 17 Wh consumption. You can minimize that with the usual suspects: reduce resolution, limit framerate and tweak steam scaling settings. Just by changing from 90Hz to 30Hz I got the drainage close to 10Wh.
The game is not that complex to justify this power usage, and it is usually a symptom caused by other issues under the hood. Increased hardware costs are making consumers more aware of performance needs. Optimizations are a must and should not be overlooked, now more than ever.
There were also some UI problems with the controllers, while I was trying to switch the resolution on the Steam Deck, I could not scroll down to see the options, so I did the adjustments blindly.
Still Worth it
Despite the rough edges with urgent need of polish, performance optimization and control tweaks, I really enjoyed my time with Packing Life. It feels like two different games in one. One relaxing and cozy to play in a calm night, and another that makes me want to seize the means of production.
Don’t take my word for it, Packing Life is available on Steam, and it offers a demo for you to try.
Note: We were provided a review key by the publisher.