A Pizza Delivery Review (Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5 & PC)

If, by some random chance, the likes of Herdling, Lake, and Keeper pooled their greatest toppings to knead a new doughy extract, I’d like to imagine that the final product would look an awful lot like A Pizza Delivery. Unlike this aforementioned trio, however, there are no Calicorns to herd in A Pizza Delivery, nor are there any packages to post or towering mechanical companions to aid. No, in this world—a hallucinatory diorama of pizza pies and purgatory-based memories—everything orbits a simple objective: to deliver the final pizza of the shift. A simple objective, true, but one that also carries a tremendous amount of weight and emotional baggage.

On paper, A Pizza Delivery sounds fundamentally barebones. I won’t lie to you, I thought the same way about it when I first hopped aboard the scooter and set out into the night. But then, out of the blue, it all started to click; the aurora lights ushered me deeper, and before long, I was journeying into a creative waterfall of peculiar tales and eccentric characters, twisting landscapes and magnificent panoramas of an almost otherworldly nature. It was Death Stranding without the burden; it was an expedition that wanted me to accomplish something. It wasn’t just about delivering a pizza; it was about connecting with the spiritual underbelly of a wondrous world of whimsical art and flourishing heirlooms.

I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t judge the book by its cover. At first, I envisioned a painful and grueling task—an endless path and a liminal stepping stone route that would ultimately lead me to an anticlimax. But I was wrong. The pizza was a metaphor, and the game ran much, much deeper than I could’ve imagined.

A Slice of Life

A Pizza Delivery takes the traditional slice-of-life tale to another dimension—to the foot of a star-crossed dream that hovers between fiction and fantasy, homely comforts and emotional warmth. A cozy and somewhat unexpected journey in its purest form, it invites you to hop aboard a scooter and embark on a simple yet elegant adventure through the internal dioramas of purgatory—a world where stories are told over a slice of pizza, and landmarks are rooted into a spiraling cortex of seemingly infinite dimensions.

The journey is a simple one: a young courier sets out to deliver the final pizza of the night. What entails in the aftermath of the despatch process, however, isn’t quite as ordinary. Engulfed by a series of peculiar biomes and ever-shifting corridors, you—the rider with a scooter and a knack for exploring the unknown—step out of your comfort zone to embrace the world and all its mystical secrets and reality-warping nodes.

A Pizza Delivery is a narrative-driven experience at its core, one that gracefully blends the art of simple yet meaningful conversation with small bursts of interactive storytelling and puzzle solving. It’s about exploring the “great beyond”; it’s about connecting; and it’s about sharing the simple pleasures of life over a small slice of pizza. Does it need to be anything more than that? Honestly, no. Granted, it doesn’t scratch all of those baubles on your back, and it doesn’t really tap into a bottomless hole of gameplay-heavy mechanics, for that matter. Yet, it does something special: it spins a yarn, and it keeps you wanting to unravel more of it. That’s something a whole lot of indie developers often struggle to comprehend.

Sharing Is Caring

There are, of course, a couple of minor issues to point out here. Well, I say issues, when really I mean tidbits that might sway your decision on whether or not to buy A Pizza Delivery. Don’t get me wrong, mechanic-wise, it’s a smooth ride with few technical issues or game-breaking bugs to sully its good design. But, to make it clear, A Pizza Delivery doesn’t have a huge amount of diversity in its puzzle department. What I mean to say is that, if you have played through the likes of Herdling or, failing that, then any other on-rails platforming game à la Little Nightmares, then you will probably know which set pieces flesh out this journey and all of its scattered crossroads.

With all of the above said, A Pizza Delivery is, in spite of its scarce shortcomings, a genuinely enjoyable game with a lot of heart and soul to call its own. It’s a brief endeavor, for sure, but one that is also made all the more compelling thanks to its rich and dynamic nature, its narrative-driven tapestries and comforting effects. The tales are pleasantly detailed, as are the characters and their distinct personalities. Again, the puzzles are a little hit and miss, but that’s a small price to pay for an otherwise thoroughly enjoyable experience, truth be told.

Verdict

A Pizza Delivery isn’t just a run-of-the-mill courier exploit; it’s a fascinating journey into the purgatory of a like-minded collective of eccentric individuals and their stories. The game, as a whole, still fosters a short and to-the-point overarching objective, true. And yet, it does something a little differently to help pepper that textbook narrative with its own unique twists, whether it’s in the form of seemingly hallucinatory dioramas or environmental curveballs, peculiar folks with intriguing stories or strange but pivotal moments that pique your imagination. Truly, A Pizza Delivery is a lot more than what it states on the box, and I’m overjoyed about that.

A Pizza Delivery feels like an easy one to recommend, more so when you have a natural admiration of wholesome stories and shifting dioramas that tell their tales with the power of imagery and emotional binds. And frankly, it captures all of these things with its simple but striking composition. To that end, I’d say that if you do share that bind with all of the above qualities, then you will probably enjoy hopping on the scooter and taking a big ol’ bite out of this peddling pie. It might not satisfy your hunger for a gameplay-loaded experience, but if you’re content with the idea of simply strolling through a gleaming dreamscape for a short while, then you ought to consider boarding A Pizza Delivery and taking it for a spin.