Vidjama Gmaes Work

The script.

Ship Inc. is a cozy shipping game, a concept that the title and graphics might not immediately give away. You play as a person who works at a shipping facility. Every day you get a set number of orders and your task is to pack boxes, label them correctly, and ship them out. Between shifts you’ll also be buying supplies, upgrading your tools, and eventually making passive income until you unlock everything and have nothing else to do.

The challenge, if you want to call it that, is just in the details. Certain items require certain labels otherwise the game financially penalizes you. It’s not difficult, everything is clearly labeled if it needs a sticker indicating it has chemicals, it’s radioactive, heavy, etc. I found a majority of my labeling was to show there were Italian items in the box, making heavy use of the fragile sticker. There’s also gift receipts, and special customer notes. Occasionally a cat will jump into a box and play in it, leaving it unusable for the rest of the day. You can buy a cat bed to stop this but you can’t take the cat out of the box because you’re not a monster.

And then you play a small physics game to load up the trucks, and head home to spend $20 on a scratch off ticket.

At the end of every shift you can basically steal any item that wasn’t ordered and sell it at a fence. It’s kinda like being an Amazon warehouse worker. I assumed at first that there was a chance of getting caught and there isn’t. And while I normally game as a goody two shoes, the fact that the company penalizes at every opportunity had me stealing everything without remorse. I don’t care if it’s a $2 pencil, that’s going into my pocket to pay for the fifth time this week I forgot to put a wet item sticker on a box.

Ship Inc. is not a game to play if you’re looking for an intricately built business sim. The game is not balanced at all regarding cost and income and after a couple hours you’ll have more money than you know what to do with. You need to be especially incompetent or actively trying to bankrupt yourself to get a game over. There’s tons of chances for easy income, like cleaning dirty clothes or getting sixty bucks every time you fix a bottle of wine or vase. Who is paying me that $60? I’m curious.

My biggest problem with Ship Inc is that the game moves on whether you’re ready or not. For example you might start getting orders with label stickers you don’t own yet, and you’re just forced to deal with the penalties until you can buy them which takes longer thanks to the penalties. The cost of poor preparation isn’t terrible. If you don’t have enough labels for example you’ll have to buy them at a higher cost, but you’re looking at spending $4 instead of $3. There’s something of a strategy to picking the smallest box possible to pack items but again you’re not talking about losing much if you pick a bigger box.

Otherwise I don’t have much to complain about. It is a cozy game, if you’re looking for story or big moments then you’re gonna wanna look elsewhere.

I bought Ship Inc for $6 on sale and at $10 normal cost I would say it’s worth the price of admission if you want a simple game with a very repetitive gameplay loop. Check it out on Steam and like and subscribe for more reviews.