Who doesn’t like pizza? It should be a staple of every diet, irrespective of calories and cost, and I don’t care about your thoughts on Hawaiian. You do you. However, Eric Osuna’s game, A Pizza Delivery, isn’t a dough-making simulator, nor is it comparable to Crazy Taxi, loaded with steaming pizza.
A Pizza Delivery is an existential narrative adventure that is better friends with Little Miss Ambiguity than Mr Clarity. You appear in a corridor with a fresh box ready for delivery, and a few pop-up commands inform you how to play. Yes, you’re going to knock on the door, then drop the pizza without collecting a tip.
As you head outside, you realise this isn’t the bustling city or suburbia, and instead, the serene countryside, a lonesome building you’ve just visited, and a payphone that’s going to be your rabbithole. Cue some moped mayhem, and now it’s time to explore.
Unfortunately for me, the driving aspect in A Pizza Delivery was more anchovy-based (to be clear, I don’t like that topping), and you slide all over the place and feel incredibly floaty. Sure, this isn’t a big-budget open-worlder, but it mutes the cinematics a little, as do the slightly awkward animations.
Using the Alice in Wonderland reference, you find a channel of sorts that’ll take you to another world, and then it’s a case of solving simple puzzles, but mostly searching for clues. These clues provide the key codes to enter buildings, but more importantly, establish your character. Now this is the core aspect of the game.
Your first encounter with a human is somewhat surreal. They act ‘normal’, but they’ve lost any sort of colour to them and are blending in with the scenery. Here is when the human interaction and storytelling swap the moped for a more hearty Ducati. That’s not to say the narrative accelerates at an alarmingly fast pace, but the feedback is more visceral, if slightly sleepy.
Pace isn’t important in A Pizza Delivery, and it’s about finding yourself as much as the delivery location without Google Maps. When interacting with these other folk, you can share a slice of pizza with them (without getting fired), and this connection can help build some wholesome experiences that may make you question your own social footprint.
That’s perhaps what is more thought-provoking about A Pizza Delivery as it plants the seeds for you to reflect – not just as your character, but as yourself. From a technical standpoint and actual gameplay, it’s quite flat as for an open world, there’s not actually that much to see and do, and the dream in which you inhabit lacks any real direction.
However, the concept is very good, and the feelings of immersion in very welcoming landscapes make this a short yet indulgent experience that is more likely to resonate with you after playing the game. Does that make sense? Again, it’s the relatable reflections it offers in a low-demand manner. Before ordering your next pizza, have a think about checking this out, but don’t wait too long or you’ll blend into the background…
