Game Review: Paperman: Adventure Delivered

By Al

Players: 1-2
Platforms: Nintendo Switch, XBox, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, PC

Colorful, character-driven platformers have seen a resurgence lately, and that boom leads us straight to the game we're going to be looking at today. Coming in at the tail end of 2023 is Paperman: Adventure Delivered, a classic style, collect-a-thon platformer that features four playable characters that all have their own unique abilities. It's out now on just about every major console and PC, and boy do I have a lot to say about it. I don't want to get ahead of the review, but most of what will follow is going to be anything but positive. We're about to jump straight into the deep end here, so let's cut the intro short and get right into it.

One more reason to hate the post office.

This is it. This is the game.

Paperman: Adventure Delivered opens with Paperman's post office celebrating over a million deliveries. Ignoring the fact that this isn't really a big number in the grand scheme of things, they choose to mark this occasion by sending out several golden letters to their most loyal customers. This attracts the attention of a dragon who proceeds attacks the post office, stealing all the mail in the process. This includes the golden letter of course, but don't worry, he apparently just scatters them around his liar for you to pick up again. Anyhow, it's up to Paperman to recover all the stolen mail, and thankfully he's not alone in this task. Joining him is the speedy Express, the strong Carl, and the light-footed Scrolly. Our heroes land on the dragon's island and immediately put their platforming skills to work. While I don't have a lot of good things to say about this game, I will admit that the characters are as unique as promised. Paperman is the well-rounded hero who can double jump and use his thrown letters to teleport. Carl is the strongest, the slowest, and is the only one who can push blocks. Express can dash across delicate falling platforms, and sometimes off the world if you don't remember to stop him. Scrolly fights with a feather that he can also use to float along gusts of wind. Each hero will have their uses throughout the adventure, but you can only control one at a time. There's probably more to talk about regarding the story, but I'll leave it at that since I was unable to clear the game for reasons we will get to.

Random collectables are random.

I will admit that I liked the costumes.

Paperman's levels are huge and broken up into several gated off sections that require a series of switches to be hit in order to progress. Each area is basically a large circle around the player, and extend far off in every direction. Each zone is filled with enemies, NPCs, the aforementioned switches, and tons of collectables. Let me get the collectables out the way now, since I was confused as to how they operated at first. Each of the four main collectables are attached to the four characters themselves, and they only serve to unlock new costumes. It's kind of cool that the unlockable costumes aren't bought with these items, but unlock sets of costumes as you hit specific thresholds. Besides those four main ones, there are other more unique collectables to find in each level. These offer far less in-game purposes, and are literally there just for the sake of completion. Like I said earlier, much of what you'll be doing is hitting switches as you make your way to a boss. Just about every switch is further gated behind something you need a specific character for. Some will need Express' dash ability, others will need Carl to move some blocks, some will have Scrolly float across hazards, and the worst ones will need more than one character's ability to clear. We'll go into the character change mechanic more later, but this is what you can expect to be spending most of your time doing, hitting switches. Enemies do pop up here and there, but expect to simply button mash your way through them. Collision detection is all over the place, so you may get hit a couple times, but your life will regenerate quickly once you're out of combat. If you die, you respawn at the last checkpoint, and there is no way to completely Game Over. There are some sub-boss encounters here and there, but these can be handled the same way as the regular enemies. This all sounds rather standard for the most part, right? Surely they can't mess up this formula... right? ... Right?

I didn't even mention the non-fun minigames.

Get ready to open lots of these.

I originally was going to break down everything that doesn't work in Paperman, but realized I'd be here all day if I did that, so let's talk about the big things. First up are the levels themselves. They are huge, but the game's draw distance is so bad that it's hard to see where you're going most of the time. It's also just as hard to keep track of where you've been. Each area has the same generic look, and the lack of an in-game map means that you'll find yourself lost more than a few times. Normally you could use the presence of collectables to inform you of unexplored areas, but Paperman shows all picked up collectables as silhouettes if you load the game. While they do look different up close, the bad draw distance makes using them as a navigation tool difficult. Next up is the camera. 3D platformers have long been plagued by bad cameras, and Paperman continues that tradition. I can't begin to explain how many sections were made near impossible because the camera decided to do its own thing when I needed it to be in a specific area. There are some precision platforming sections that I was never able to complete the way the game wanted me to because the camera would get itself stuck on a wall, or move itself in a completely different direction mid-jump. Add to this the completely broken controls, and you have a recipe for continual frustration. Everything feels delayed, and simply controlling your characters is a floaty affair, never mind the imprecise jumping. Thankfully this game is also broken in just about every other way. I was able to simply jump against walls until I clipped through them, or use cliffs to drag me up to the end of platforming sections. Using this I was able to bypass most of the first level's more annoying areas. Keep in mind that I did try to play by the game's rules, but if the game is going to be this broken, I'm going to take advantage of it. Sadly, I wasn't able to clear the game using these techniques. I wasn't even able to clear the first level since I found that the one obstacle I wasn't able to cheese my way through was the level boss door. I could see the dragon on the other side, but reaching him was impossible. Since Paperman was seriously wearing out its welcome, I considered this the end of my time with the game. I honestly feel that I gave it more of a shot than others will, so I don't feel bad at all stopping when I did.

The fun character switch mechanic...

The camera is your biggest enemy.

I don't want to just attack the game, but I'm finding it really hard to say anything nice about it. The premise isn't bad I guess and I do think that the character changing mechanic is a good idea. Things similar to it have worked in several games before, Sonic Heroes comes to mind right off the bat, but Paperman absolutely drops the ball. Taking Sonic Heroes for example, character changing is down to a simple button press, and all characters are available at any given time. That's not the case in Paperman. Paperman instead makes you return to a checkpoint for any changes, and that alone is beyond annoying. If the developers were going to make it so clunky to change, then the switching elements should've been limited to just a few areas a stage, or for optional item pick-ups. Here you're forced to change for just about every switch, and it literally takes about 30 seconds to a full minute for that change to actually happen. I can't begin to describe how frustrating this is to experience in real-time, and it basically breaks everything about the game. Wasting a literal minute or two to find a nearby checkpoint, switch to a character, hit a switch or whatever, and then switch back to the character you prefer, is far too many steps for any one thing in any game. Why they couldn't have put all the abilities into the single Paperman character is beyond me. You'd think this would be solved with multiplayer, but that's just as wonky. For starters the Nintendo Switch version, which is what I played for this review, is limited to only two players. I've seen press releases that mention it being a four-player game, but I can't help but wonder if that's just some sort of additional bait and switch. Anyway, with just two players you still have to deal with the character shift mechanic and you now have to experience the game running even worse than before. Yes, this also affects the already limited draw distance too. I honestly don't understand how they looked at this game and decided it was worth selling for actual money.

Platforming at this angle is difficult.

I guess this is a miniboss.

I'm done talking about gameplay for now, so let's move on to the visuals. The odd thing about Paperman's graphics is that I initially thought that some of the character designs weren't all that bad. I actually was initially drawn to the game by its key art. Then when you see everything in action, you realize that the simplicity in the design is more likely due to simple laziness, rather than an intentional design decision. Some models have a cel-shaded look to them, and that looks not too bad, but that's literally the only good thing I could think to say about the graphics, and it's not even that big of a compliment. I've used the term "colorful" to describe the game earlier on, but there's actually not that much of it going on once you play it for a while. Rather than a rich, vibrant world, it feels more like a color-fill tool was applied to just about every model, object, and texture. I've already mentioned the draw distance thing, but it's rather amazing how badly this game can run while not looking particularly impressive visually. I knew I was in for a treat when the opening movie looked like a 240p YouTube video, and that set the tone for what followed. There's very little animation, the color palette is limited, and I'm not sure the developers even know what the word "optimized" means. Part of me wants to at least keep praising the character designs that brought me to this point, but the more I think about them, the more I realize that creating anthropomorphic letters and parcels isn't all that unique. Enemy designs are a little better in that regard, but they tend to stand out in odd ways. I never really shook the idea that they may have come from another game, or that this is entire thing is a reskin of some obscure platforming game like we used to see in the Wii days. One thing I can tell you for sure, graphics are one of the worst aspects of the game, and that's saying a lot.

I really don't want to keep tearing apart the game, but I have a lot to complain about when it comes to sound. First off is the music. Every single track in the game sounds so generic that I wonder if it isn't just library music. It rarely fits the scene it's in, and it usually stands out in the worst way. Next up are the sound effects. It's rare that I see a game fumble sound effects as badly as Paperman, but here we are. Besides the fact that a bunch of actions don't seem to have any sound effects at all attached to them, the ones that do tend to be much delayed. Every enemy strike that had a sound effect always seemed a second off at best, and practically a minute late at worst. Combined with the poor hit detection, and the entire game has a broken wonkiness to it that is indescribable unless you've seen it in action. That's not even my biggest issue with the sound. Paperman's voice acting is all over the place. The opening narration sounds all sorts of compressed, and the sound mix in general is never consistent and seems to be set in a way where nothing is ever set to the volume it should be. Worse still are the character quips. There are some who like to say that Mario doing a "woohoo!" or whatever when he jumps can become grating after a while, but those who think that should really play Paperman to put that into proper perspective. Dying over and over again when trying to use Express' dash skill is made all the worse by the fact that you have to hear his one-liners each time, and so many sound bytes like that now live rent free in my head despite me trying to wipe them from my memory. It's honestly best to just play the game on silent. I'm really not trying to exaggerate here, it's all that bad. 

Paperman's targeting mechanic at work.

This section broke me.

This is the section where I normally talk about replayability versus cost, but that's such a big can of worms that I don't even know where to begin. Everything about this game made me not want to ever go back to it. It took a lot of willpower to not simply shut it off at the fifteen minute mark and never speak of it again. Unfortunately I had this review to write so I was forced to keep at it. I tried and tried, but I just couldn't be bothered to finish even the first level. From what I understand there are a total of three of them, but seeing as the game actively seems to want me to not play it, I wouldn't be surprised if those other levels don't actually exist. I guess you can say that it's infinitely replayable since the first stage alone is ridiculously unforgiving. I'm sure someone will try to beat this for some sort of YouTube challenge or something, but there's really no reason to bother otherwise. There are collectables to get, levels to beat, and costumes to unlock, but the game is just far too broken to bother with any of that. Normally I'd be willing to just forgive and forget most of this in the name of bad games just being bad games, but then I saw its insane price tag. I figured that a game like this, as in a clearly unfinished piece of shovelware, would at least have a price tag closer to the 10 dollar range. Unfortunately I was very wrong, three times wrong in fact. The $29.99 price is downright insulting. There's no way anyone could shameless ask for that much, but here we are. I'm so shocked by all this that I'm just going to move on.

I hate all platforming sections in this game.

Just go home and forget about this game.

There are very few games that I'll recommend that everyone skip, but Paperman is that game. I like to think that there'll be someone out there who'll enjoy any game, but I can't imagine that person exists for Paperman. The sad thing is that I don't think that the premise is bad at all. This could've been a good game, but obviously it isn't. There's simply no excuse for releasing a game in this state, and I can't wait to never speak of this game again. I'm not sure what upsets me more, the fact that wasted hours of my life playing it, or the fact that I wasted yet more hours to finish this review. Do yourself a favor and play something else. ANYTHING ELSE.

Check Out Paperman: Adventure Delivered on Nintendo Switch:
https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/paperman-adventure-delivered-switch/

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Story: C
Gameplay: D
Graphics: D
Music/Sound: C
Value: D-

Overall: D (And this is just because it takes a lot to hit an actual F for me.)

Pros:
+ The concept of a collect-a-thon platformer that features four interchangeable characters isn't a bad one.
+ The characters and enemies look quirky and cute for the most part.
+ Getting costumes in exchange for the in-game collectibles is a neat gimmick.

+/- If there are four characters to choose from, why isn't the Switch version a four-player game?

Cons:
- Controls feel extremely loose, making it hard to complete some platforming challenges the way they're intended.
- The poor draw distance, and the lack of an in-game map, make navigating the levels a chore.
- Needing to go back to a checkpoint to change between the four characters makes the entire character-change mechanic feel broken.
- While the music isn't too bad, the vocal quips the characters make can become extremely annoying.
- Performs poorly, and seems to be generally un-optimized.
- The rather high price tag of $29.99 feels almost insulting.

A copy of this game was provided to us free-of-charge by the publisher for the purpose of this review. This did not affect our review in any way.

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Nothing about this was good.

#Paperman