It has been quite fascinating to see different indie developers in this generation taking a crack at creating retro-styled arcade games of all sorts. Some of the more exciting ones have managed to pretty directly take elements from multiple classics and combine them, like Donut Dodo for instance, but others have gone their own route to do something more distinctive. While Mayhem Mail absolutely has some classic flavor, reminding me a bit of old-school titles like Flippy or perhaps Mappy, there’s no question that it has staked out a much higher degree of difficulty than the old-school norm, which ends up making it stand on its own.

As you may have guessed by the game’s title, you’ll be playing the part of a mailman, and your challenge will be to collect and then deliver the colored envelopes you’ll find strewn about to the appropriate mailboxes. While this starts out feeling somewhat simple enough, it doesn’t take very long before you’ll be spending your time cursing the various elements that make stages quite challenging. Whether it's any number of enemy types that will crawl, scurry, or race around that you’ll have to avoid, or traps like platforms that will fade away after you step on them while floating over spikes, there are any number of ways you can die at any time. For an added challenge, if you’re trying to drive up your score, you’ll also want to grab all of the envelopes at once and then keep track of which mailboxes you need to deliver them to in order to earn every point possible.

While, for the most part, this all works well enough, the game’s biggest obstacle in my mind is its controls that feel like they’re on the loose side. Your movement is a bit fast, your jumps can be a little hard to control, and actions like grabbing onto ladders don’t always feel as clean as they could. Challenging platformers always need to step up with their best performance where controls are concerned, but in this case I think it’s the game’s overall speed that complicates matters. Even when you’re mentally prepared with your plan for how to survive challenging platforming situations, keeping in control and on top of the timing and accuracy of everything you’re doing can be a pain. This makes for an experience that should still satisfy players looking for a gauntlet of tough stages to conquer, but can probably be an easy pass for anyone else.