Introspective Feelings in 20 Minutes or Less

Eric Osuna’s A Pizza Delivery starts you off with about all you really need to know about being a pizza deliverer: you’ve got a pizza, go to the spot, supply that person with a pizza.  Get to it, scooter.  But when you finish your first delivery and you walk out of a playfully detailed and colorful building to a sprawling grassland with nothing but a vespa, a payphone, and the horizon in front of you: you’ve at least got my interest to see who’s on the other line and who else is getting a slice.

A Pizza Delivery takes its Vespa-riding protagonist, B, on a light puzzle walking simulator through a purgatory-esque journey to deliver one last pizza for the day.  Puzzles never really reach head-scratching levels but are enough to break the walking up for a bit.  Most involve finding objects and using them to open doors or the errant conveyor belt while trying to avoid rain so your pizza doesn’t get soaked.  I like how some of the puzzles blend into each stage and help tell either a past tale of B’s or of the person inhabiting the next stop on the road.

There’s a stage for each character, who you can share a slice of the extra pizza you have with or don’t if you wanna be a stickler, that all come with some baggage to claim and a story to tell.  Why would you find yourself in your own world?  What could bring you away from everyone?  Is it suffering silence, an imposed will to begrudgingly live, or the yearn for something more with being newly alone?  Though there’s no voice acting, there’s a lot of personality within these characters and it’s worth taking the time to provide them a delicious, albeit cold, slice to share.

Each stop provides a scenic backdrop into each of its inhabitants, with cold isolating streets of memory to warm lake views providing a somber reflection of the good times.  All the stops carry a different taste than the last and really expand the world that’s provided in the 2-3 hour story.  I didn’t encounter any visual glitches or any breakage within each stage and really got enamored with taking time to ride around and see all that was around before going on to my next spot.

I would recommend playing A Pizza Delivery with a controller as playing on an Xbox controller (you can try with a PlayStation controller but there are no specific icons and I had trouble with it) is much smoother than playing on keyboard.  There’s also a small moment that requires you to press and hold a lot of buttons and the combination of keys to hit is…odd to say the least.  There is auto-saving but only at the start of each stop; I found this out the hard way by finishing a cutscene and puzzle, quitting out of the game to grab some dinner, and coming back and losing about 20-30 minutes of progress.  There’s also some UI issues where grabbing your pizza and crouching is flipped on the menu screen on controller and will cause a bit of confusion on your first foray.

While there isn’t much to really chew on after the story, there are multiple achievements to go for that warrant a 2nd or 3rd playthrough, A Pizza Delivery does provide a cozy interlude through ideal landscapes.  With some slight hiccups along the way, it’s nothing that will make your ride super bumpy and is a worthy introduction to Eric Osuna’s brand of storytelling.

7/10

Review code provided by developer.