KeyWe hands-on preview: Overcooked in the post office

There’s something immensely rewarding about chaotic co-op puzzlers where you and your friend must work together to perform complicated tasks as quickly as possible. Overcooked asked players to work together in fragmented kitchens and now KeyWe has players controlling tiny little kiwis as they send letters, organize mail, and feed the rambunctious cassowary delivery birds. I recently got the chance to play Stonewheat & Sons’ KeyWe on Steam ahead of its launch. So I got my fiancé, packed a lunch, and headed to work as a postie.

The premise of KeyWe is simple at heart: you and a friend work together to send telegrams, check and sort mail, man the post office counter, and help out with the lunch order. The only drawback is, you’re tiny little kiwi birds and the keyboard keys are all over the desk, mail is flying in too fast, and the cassowary delivery animals are yelling at one another during the lunch break!

Each mission, or “shift” as the game calls it, has one main objective that must be completed. For the Telegraph Desk, words appear on a screen and must be spelled out using the typewriter keys that are littered about. To prevent time waste, players will each cover a portion of the keys, and hit them as quickly as possible in order to end the mission with a decent time.

Currently, there’s a good variety of missions available to test your skills. The Transcription Room has you collecting words and sticking them to a letter in ransom-note style, the Shipping Floor requires parcels be correctly labelled and stickered before being sent off, Conveyer Belt Chaos has dozens of packages streaming in that must be labelled before they reach the other end of the conveyer belt, and then there’s the Lunch Break, where you take off your postie hat and put on your chef apron and help feed the cassowary mail birds.

Replay value comes in the form of the aforementioned time limits. The faster you clear a mission, the better your score, which in turn nets you more tickets. These tickets are used to purchase little cosmetic items for your kiwi bird such as backpacks, sunglasses and hats, and even a change of coloring.

Players will need to sharpen up their communication skills and keep a cool head as the mail stacks up. Because rain, hail, or shine, the mail has to get out – even if you are just a small, flightless bird. Together, my fiancé and I tackled the missions repeatedly until we were able to get a perfect score. There was enough challenge here that we really had to knuckle down and formulate strategies on who was doing what and how we should organize ourselves. There’s plenty to love here, and I’m personally keen to see what else the full game has to offer.

KeyWe is scheduled to release on August 31, 2021 on Steam, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch. You can add KeyWe to your wishlist on Steam so you don’t miss it when it releases. Be sure to keep it locked to Shacknews as we bring you the latest on KeyWe.

Sam Chandler

Guides Editor

Hailing from the land down under, Sam Chandler brings a bit of the southern hemisphere flair to his work. After bouncing round a few universities, securing a bachelor degree, and entering the video game industry, he's found his new family here at Shacknews as a Guides Editor. There's nothing he loves more than crafting a guide that will help someone. If you need help with a guide, or notice something not quite right, you can message him on X: @SamuelChandler