In addition to running each character's business, you have to keep them fed and get them to sleep. You also want to manage their addictions; Andrus needs to smoke cigarettes periodically or he becomes racked with coughing fits, and, like so many people, Vinny gets sluggish without caffeine. Melanie wants to spend time with her daughter, which she can do by walking her home from school each day. The characters also have responsibilities to deal with outside of running their businesses: rents to pay, contracts to maintain, hearings to attend. Fittingly, there is no quest log or other automated in-game reminder about these responsibilities; it's up to you to remember that you have to go to that hearing on Wednesday morning or swing by the newspaper office to keep your deliveries coming. Forget, and face the consequences.
With a bagel in his belly and a caffeinated spring in his step, Vinny is ready to face the day.
Managing your time effectively in Cart Life is very difficult, but that's the point; these characters need to spend practically every spare moment working if they're going to meet their obligations. The fictional city of Georgetown has attractions--bars, pizzerias, swanky coffee houses--but every minute you spend at establishments like these is a minute you could be spending making the money you desperately need. These characters don't have much time to spend enjoying themselves, and can't afford to spend their money frivolously. Decisions like whether to take the bus or a taxi can weigh heavily on you. Is it better to spend a lot more money to get where you're going faster, or to spend just 75 cents and waste an hour on your trip? It's a difficult and worrisome existence in Cart Life, and that is to the game's credit.
Regardless of which character you play, Georgetown is a great backdrop for your story. Its various neighborhoods, ranging from a grungy industrial district to a high-end shopping area, are all believable. And the people you meet make engaging in small talk at your stand a pleasure. Yes, you see the same relatively few customers over and over again, but they each have a name, a personality, and stories to share. One of the game's sweetest pleasures is looking at the short profiles for your customers that become available once you complete the story. Click on the trio of men who call themselves The Three, for instance, and you learn this: "They came in on different trains for the noises, sounds and sweet airs of city life. They're spending the hours in the night kitchen, in the summer house. They will return again."
There's a poetry not only to City Life's language, but to its visuals as well. The pixelated characters are wonderfully expressive; if you're cooking bagels as Vinny and screw up the recipe, a slight movement of his eyebrows conveys volumes about his disappointment in the results of his work. And the wide view of the camera as your character walks home late at night conveys something of the sense of loneliness that can come from strolling on your own down desolate city streets.
It's easy to get caught up in the struggles of Cart Life's characters. Unfortunately, technical problems often pull you out of the experience. You might be playing as Melanie and walking your daughter Laura home from school, only to arrive home and be informed by your sister that you never picked Laura up. As Vinny, you might be in the machine shop to pick up your cart, only to have the shop close for the night and give you no option to take the cart with you as you leave. Or, playing as Andrus, you might find that scripting errors frequently cause the game to crash, giving you no option but to restart the day you were playing and hope that the same problem doesn't occur again.
Issues like these are all too common and severely compromise Cart Life's impact. There's a beauty to Cart Life's depiction of contemporary urban existence that's utterly unlike anything most games offer. It's in the way it celebrates the hard work of ordinary people. It's in the downtrodden gaze of its characters as they wait for the bus, knowing that the next day won't be any easier than this one. Underneath its bugs, Cart Life is absolutely a game worthy of being played. Unfortunately, in its current state, it's harder than it should be to experience the qualities that make Cart Life extraordinary.
