A Pizza Delivery Review (PC): A Lonely Drive Down Memory Lane

Everyone comes to video games for a different reason, but escapism may be the term you hear thrown around the most. I’m a real sucker for games that offer a “power fantasy” which is deceptively mundane. Thanks to its namesake, I was fairly confident that A Pizza Delivery would hit the spot.

Presentation and Narrative Deliver, But Exploration is a Fixer Upper

A Pizza Delivery is a narrative exploration game where players step into the shoes of B, a delivery driver with all sorts of baggage hanging behind her. B is charged with delivering a pizza across what turns out to be a dreamlike landscape filled with puzzles, secrets, and memories. Atmosphere is the backbone of A Pizza Delivery, and does a lot to deliver on the promise of its premise. The game features a cute artstyle that doesn’t stray too far from realism, and many of the environments are a real thing of beauty. While some areas resemble real locations, others are purely liminal spaces. Both are relatively empty, but I think the lonely feeling this created was pretty effective. I just wish that navigating this world was as enjoyable as ogling it is.

For a game that expects the player to spend most of their time straddling a vespa, I found a lot lacking from the driving mechanics. Driving doesn’t rely on any intuitive understanding of momentum, meaning you’ll often come to a full stop if you let off the gas at all. Steering isn’t much better, and it isn’t clunky in the kind of way where I could call it intentionally “analog”, but more so in the way where it makes me long for any sequence where I just get to walk around.

Speaking of which, the puzzles you solve throughout the game are perfectly fine. Solving puzzles is often as simple as discovering a key item or remembering some information. You lower a water level here, you unlock a door there. It’s simple, and I wouldn’t say they leave a lot to be desired. They were satisfying enough to solve, and always gave a bit more insight into your own past, and occasional glimpses into the struggles of characters you had met along the way.

The biggest roadblock I encountered in A Pizza Delivery was a general state of bugginess. Both driving and puzzle-solving were especially bogged down by this. One puzzle seemed almost dead set on refusing to let me interact with the item I had discovered that was meant to solve it. Another instance, and by far the most annoying, began when I was simply driving along the road. B stood up in a t pose and almost caused the vespa to flail into the floor. I was able to dismount and stand up, but then found myself unable to get back on again, which forced me to reset my game entirely. I suspect that losing progress is a cardinal sin for many, but I at least had the consolation of there not being much time since the last checkpoint.

Final Verdict

A Pizza Delivery’s saving grace is definitely nestled into the narrative it manages to tell despite the wrinkles left in its design. The escapist fantasy on offer is one in which you can revisit the regrets of your past, and even if you can’t get a second chance at doing the right thing, maybe you can help other people not trek down the same road you did. This is a world in which you can find another stranger out in the lonely city, paralyzed by their own memories and freezing half to death. You can save them by reminding them that the only way out is forward, and maybe even warm them up with a nice slice of pizza.

A Pizza Delivery was reviewed on PC with a code provided by Dolores Entertainment. It is also available on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X.

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