Rainforest
Running a warehouse in RAINFOREST.
We live in an age of convenience. If you suddenly fancy a hot meal or a few groceries, but don’t fancy leaving the house, you need only hit up Deliveroo or Amazon and an overworked zero-hour contract worker will ferry the items to your home.
Rainforest is a small game that imagines life on the other side of the equation, by putting you in the role of a stressed-out employee in a warehouse owned by an Amazonesque online store. In this small arcade-style game, you have to run frantically between conveyor belts spitting out packages of various sizes, before stacking them onto your trolley and pushing them to the appropriate shelving units. If a package falls to the floor before you get to it, there’s a good chance it’ll be damaged. If three packages are ruined, you will lose your job and, well, the game.
It’s easy enough to avoid this fate on the lowest difficulty, where the conveyors move pretty slowly, but on the medium and hard modes this is a hectic game of spinning plates, which neatly communicates the stress of working to a strict time limit. It’s not a complicated game, but to reach the peak of the high score table you’ll need to collect packages in a tactical order, filling every crevice on your trolley, like Tetris, before delivering them to the correct shelves in an expedient manner.
With only a single stage on offer, there isn’t much meat to Rainforest. Also, the tiny art assets can be difficult to read, making it tricky to differentiate the variously sized packages. It is at least an enjoyably barbed jab at a certain monopolistic online store.
61