A Pizza Delivery Is A Gorgeous Drive Through A Surreal World
One last stop.
Why is it so often the last task you need to do at work that’s the hardest to get through? As much as you might struggle to finish up your work day, you probably don’t have it as hard as B, a pizza delivery driver who finds herself lost in a surreal world on the way to her final drop-off of the day in A Pizza Delivery.
Out on November 7 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC, A Pizza Delivery is the first game from developer Eric Osuna. With one delivery left to make, B is sent from a normal apartment building into increasingly bizarre locales tracking down her customer’s address, stopping along the way to chat with the characters who’ve made a home of these strange spaces she finds herself in.
A Pizza Delivery is a short journey through a gorgeous, surreal world.
A Pizza Delivery is a short narrative game with light puzzle-solving, but its strongest asset is its sheer atmosphere. The dreamlike nature of its setting and B’s journey mean A Pizza Delivery doesn’t follow much of a traditional narrative, with each stop on her journey serving more to introduce a new environment to explore and a character to talk to. That meandering structure sometimes works against the game. I left many of its encounters wanting a bit more depth and narrative movement than I got out of them, and the end in particular feels extremely abrupt. But within each of its disconnected vignettes, there’s still a lot to like.
The spaces you travel through with B flit between idyllic forests, grim city streets, and grand coastlines without rhyme or reason. A doorway might lead to an entirely different time and place, and a road can end in an empty field with no such infrastructure in sight. B is confused but content to keep moving, and approaching the game with the same kind of acceptance of its discontinuity is the best way forward. You’re here to experience these spaces and stories as you move through them, not spend your time settling in and figuring out mysteries with no solution.
The world B travels through gets stranger the deeper in she gets.
B, too, must keep moving. The clearest theme running through A Pizza Delivery is the threat of stagnation. While B is always on the move, always driving her scooter to the next location, it’s clear that she’s not moving forward in any bigger way. She’s hung up on a recent breakup, stuck constantly thinking about the past. The characters she encounters are, too. Some have accepted that they’re stuck, while others push against it, but no one in this strange liminal space she’s found herself in seems to really be living their lives in a way that makes them happy.
Thankfully, there’s always pizza. B carries one pizza she’s meant to deliver to her final customer and one extra that she can do what she wants with. Carrying that spare pizza box to any of the characters you encounter along the way will let you have a deeper conversation with them, the small act of kindness in sharing it making them more willing to open up to you. There’s no grand mystery to be revealed by handing out slices, no Pizza Quest to be rewarded for. Instead, you can simply make the choice to help out your fellow travelers in a small way that’s always appreciated.
A Pizza Delivery is a short and sweet journey through a dreamlike world.
Handing out pizza is also where most of A Pizza Delivery’s puzzles come in. Carrying the pizza box means you can’t shimmy through tight spaces (as you often need to), and letting it get rained on too much will ruin the pizza inside. Maneuvering the pizza to its recipients, then, becomes a small puzzle about travel each time. None of the puzzles are particularly difficult, but the fact that they’re entirely optional imparts a little more meaning to them — you’re going out of your way to offer a small comfort to someone in need, not simply completing a puzzle to further your own progress.
A Pizza Delivery is short enough to finish in a single night, and while it could stand to pack a bit more narrative punch, I’ve still been thinking a lot about it since finishing it. Scenes of riding B’s scooter across a bridge at sunset and standing atop a massive industrial structure staring out at dancing auroras keep coming back to me, along with the short conversations I had along the way. Even if the eventual destination arrives without much ceremony, the journey to get there through A Pizza Delivery is one I’m glad I took.
