Developer: Oopsie Daisies, ARTE France
Publisher: ARTE Experience
Platform: PC, Switch (2)
Tested on: Switch 2
Tom the Postgirl – Review
“Tom? That’s an unusual name for a girl.” That was our first thought about Tom the Postgirl. It turned out that there was a meaning behind the unconventional nomenclature of our protagonist, though probably not the one you might expect; this isn’t a game about defying gender stereotypes. Instead, it’s about defying expectations. What’s hiding behind that innocent smile, you ask? Well, we’re not going to spill all the beans, but hopefully, we’ll be able to at least convince you to give Tom the Postgirl a fair shot.
Story
Don’t be fooled by the cute, children’s picture book-style aesthetics of Tom the Postgirl: things are about to get weird, uncomfortable, and even perverted. We follow Tom, an innocent-looking young girl wearing a red parka and bow, on her first day as the new post delivery person in an idyllic mountain village. As Tom goes about her delivery route across five short chapters, she cannot resist spying on the eccentric villagers through windows, cracks in walls, and binoculars, uncovering their disturbing private lives. Tom is, in fact, a Peeping Tom. We won’t go into the dark secrets of the townsfolk, as revealing what you’ll run into would ruin the experience. What we can tell you, however, is that the game dials the bizarreness up to eleven. The narrative features no traditional dialogue or even text narration, and relies entirely on visual storytelling and environmental hints. Beneath the story’s Lynchian oddities, there is still room for social critiques, ranging from environmental exploitation and capitalism to egocentrism and provocations directed at the Catholic church.
Graphics
The uncomfortable feeling that Tom the Postgirl wants to convey is amplified by its visuals. The game features a striking, hand-drawn look reminiscent of a storybook. Its aesthetic relies on a monochromatic palette, with selective red accents that pop vividly to establish a strange, bloody contrast. Both human and animal characters are designed with a cartoonish, yet creepy-cute flair. The game’s environments are divided into multiple zones teeming with background details, like exploding toads, garden gnomes and buildings to peer into. Subtle animations add life and contribute significantly to world-building. The relatively simplistic style isn’t taxing at all on the Switch 2 hardware, and we didn’t run into any visual performance issues during our time with the game, though it has been reported that the game is prone to crashing on the original Switch.
Sound
Swiss musician Aurélien Darbellay composed an original retro-inspired soundtrack for Tom the Postgirl. It matches the cartoonish rhythm and style of the game. Voice acting is limited to grunts and other mouth noises. Sound effects are heavily emphasized to drive the narrative tone instead, in the absence of spoken dialogue. The end result enhances the grotesque atmosphere.
Gameplay
The gameplay of Tom the Postgirl is surprisingly passive, even for a point-and-click adventure game. The focus is primarily on observation rather than complex reasoning. As Tom, you make your way across the village, grab packages from your mailbag, deliver them to the residents by knocking or ringing doorbells and then engage in some old-fashioned voyeurism. Your map helps you with tracking uncompleted tasks and unseen oddities. Puzzles are extremely simple, and side quests, such as finding escaped chickens or participating in a gardening competition by stealing items, are entirely optional. That said, the game does incentivise you to do as much as possible through an in-game achievement system.
The simplicity of To the Postgirl gives the absurdity of the situations you run into ample breathing room. Peeking into windows, not knowing which dark secret or weird situation you’ll find doesn’t lose its luster. That said, the lack of gameplay depth does work to the game’s detriment. At times, we felt like we weren’t actually playing a game but more like we were simply messing around with an interactive storybook. The flow of the story is determined by some of the choices you make, though it’s worth noting here that the game doesn’t support manual saves. This means that any choice you make in a playthrough is definitive and you can’t revert to an earlier save, so if you want to make a different choice, that means playing through the entire game again. Getting every achievement in a single run isn’t possible, so be prepared to revisit the game over and over if you want to 100% it.
A standard playthrough of Tom the Postgirl will take roughly two hours, though if you take your time to complete all the optional side quests and explore every detail, you can probably squeeze another hour out of your run. Conversely, if you rush, you can complete the game in around twenty minutes. The game’s replay value is tied to chasing achievements, making different choices, and viewing the different endings. While this does mean that there is some replay value to be found in Tom the Postgirl, overall, the variations between playthroughs, combined with the aforementioned lack of a manual save feature, make it so that Tom the Postgirl does overstay its welcome after that first playthrough. It’s a matter of quality over quantity, though. Take your time to savor that wonderfully weird and surprising playthrough, and you’ll find that it is well worth the €9.99 price of entry.
Conclusion
What Tom the Postgirl lacks in gameplay depth, it more than makes up for with excellent world-building and storytelling. This is a wonderfully weird dark fairy tale, presented in a compelling manner. Its replay value is undermined by that lack of gameplay depth and the absence of manual saves, but that single first playthrough alone makes Tom the Postgirl a must-have for anyone with a penchant for uncomfortably unconventional stories.
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