The UFO 50 Diaries: Onion Delivery
UPS? More like pee-ew ess!
I’m not a fan of cars. No this has nothing to do with the fact that I failed my driving test five times.
Like many folk I sit in traffic twice a day on a half empty bus, crawling through at zero miles per hour because every single person on the road had the same thought of ‘oh but public transport is so unreliable!’.
Informed heavily by civic infrastructure, of course, the experience of vehicular engagement, as I see it, is hell on earth. Games, however, rarely capture what it feels like to drive with such venom.
You don’t get the subtelties with which you find yourself cursing out other drivers for minor infractions. You don’t get the sense of dread that comes from more bloody roadworks slowing everything to a crawl. You don’t get the intuition of danger that is posed whenever you venture onto the road in one of these metal death chariots.
Enter Onion Delivery, a game in which you spend your days wrestling with navigation, with traffic and even with the game’s own control scheme in order to survive a full week of your day job of bulb haulage.
It’s gruelling, and unpleasant, and I can’t help but admire the game for it.
Please let me reiterate that my goal with the UFO 50 Diaries is not to bash my head against the games of this collection, but at the very least to give them enough time to grok what they are about, what works, and what does not.
What does not work with Onion Delivery, rather oddly, is how barebones its first day is.
The core gameplay loop remains the same throughout the seven days that make up Onion Delivery’s journey: Wrestle with the controls of a wayward vehicle; navigate a nightmarish urban environment; avoid your fellow drivers and drop off deliveries of juicy, delicious onions, before returning to the office before time runs out.
No fanfare, no reward for extra deliveries, the job is the job, as they say ‘that’s shallot’.
(Sorry, I had to get that pun in there somewhere)
I’m not going to sugar coat it, I despised this game at first. I really struggled with the controls. I’m not all that familiar with the particular brand of top down racer this is apeing, and so I found myself even screwing up what seemed like basic manouvers.
I hated the fact that hitting a wall bounced you off in a different direction. I hated the fact that trying to realign yourself after this took an era and a half. I hated that it was so easy to run into other cars in quick succession. I especially hated how often I drove into the river.
I was just about ready to close my time with the game for good, put it down as yet another experience that categorically was not for me. But something told me that persevering would pay off, and in a strange way it did.
It took several dozen attempts just to get past that first day. So much so that when I finally achieved this modest goal, I felt no elation, only a gnawing dread at what else was to follow. Six more days of this shit? No thank you sir!
However, from day two onwards, a modifier, randomly allocated from a small pool, is added to the world. This might be a zombie uprising, or an alien invasion, or the dreaded bane of any driver: heavy rain.
This is, quite literally, a game changer.
What I found with these subsequent days of logistics hell, was that by pulling my focus to these new horrible hazards, dodging alien blasts, driving around hordes of the undead, taking wider corners to avoid jets of toxic sludge, I was driving a lot better, hitting my delivery targets faster and generally avoiding a lot of the pitfalls that had previously been giving me grief.
Now, granted, it could well have been that by spending enough time with the game I had gotten better at it, but upon my return to Day One (the game has a painfully punitive three strikes policy) I found myself bashing my head against the game once more.
That first day is boring, and doesn’t showcase what the game is actually trying to evoke. It’s the extra challenge that makes the struggle interesting, and I kind of wish that those modifiers were an option from the beginning, because without them, it gives Onion Delivery a worse first impression than it actually deserves.
I still don’t particularly like the game, but with enough time under my belt with it I have come to appreciate it all the more. Its that classic thing of a capital E experience that trades in instant gratification for a longer lasting impression in your brain, further encapsulating the modus operandi of the wider project as a whole, and cementing UFO 50 as a game for the real sickos.