Need a Packet?

If you’ve ever worked retail, or any other repetitive customer-facing role, then Need a Packet?, a horror-simulator about a supermarket cashier gradually losing their mind, might sound like torture. Developed by Marginal Act and published by Sometimes You, Need a Packet? is one of the strangest games I’ve played in a long time.

There’s a crisis gripping the city: rubbish. And it’s playing on our poor protagonist Molly’s mind. Every customer she serves, and every ‘packet’ she hands out makes her fall deeper and deeper into madness. Packets, as they’re known here, are carrier bags to little Scottish me - the ones you pay 5p for now every time you go shopping after forgetting to bring your own - and this environmental issue they are causing, as well as the repetitive nature of her role, are having a big impact on Molly.

Visually, it uses a very gritty, decrepit looking pixel-art style that conveys the horror element well. As you progress, the store begins to look more and more like a medieval setting - which is what your character believes she is seeing - with dragons and chimeras flying around, trying to kill you. The audio of Need a Packet? is quite simple, with the repetitive beep of the cash register grating on you as you progress.

There’s a bullet hell mini game within Need a Packet? that seems very much out of place compared to all the other gameplay involved. It’s easy to lose a fair chunk of health here, so any money earned from your cashier job will have to be spent to replenish your health, with any spare used to furnish your apartment with protective equipment to defend against the medieval horrors that are out to get you.

It’s a simple enough game with easy to pick up controls, where all you need to do is scan produce and navigate your way through other various tasks such as avoiding alcohol sales to under-21s, and dealing with all of the trash building up in your kitchen at home - which correlates to the number of ‘packets’ given to customers at work. It has an environmental undertone, showing the impact of how plastic shopping bags are negatively affecting us and the world we live in, but this also seems quite random in its execution.

Priced at £6.29 on the Nintendo eShop, it feels quite expensive for what it is. It’s a strange game, there’s no doubt about that - so if you like the weird and wonderful, then Need a Packet? might be one to catch your eye, but otherwise, it just doesn’t have enough to keep me engaged due to the quite repetitive and tedious gameplay. Plus, there’s a lot of similarly priced games (or cheaper) on the eShop with much more to offer, so you may be better off just looking elsewhere.

In the end, we decided to give Need a Packet? the Collecting Asylum rating of 5/10.

Have you played Need a Packet? yet? What did you think of it?
Let us know in the comments below!

- V x

Thank you to Sometimes You for the Need a Packet? Nintendo Switch review code!