Pizza Possum review by Barely Magic Mike
PC/Steam, Xbox, Switch, PS
Release Date: 09/28/2023
Developer: Cosy Computer
Publisher: Raw Fury
It’s rare to see a game with such purity of purpose as Pizza Possum. Because it exists for one purpose only – to let you play as a thieving, eternally hungry possum who will stop at nothing to reach the top of his village, steal the dog king’s crown and eat his giant pizza.
I know exactly what you’re thinking - Mike, it seems like every week there’s a new game about playing as a gluttonous marsupial. Why is this gluttonous marsupial game worth playing more than all of the other gluttonous marsupial games?
Pizza Possum is billed as an arcade game and seemingly everything about it supports that notion. This game is so simple anybody could get into it, with the most literal application of pick up and play gameplay I’ve seen in a long time. You move your sneaky little possum with the left or right stick, they’ll automatically eat any food they get near, and use any items you pick up with A. That’s it. It’s so simple, in fact, that its local coop doesn’t even require more than one controller, allowing one player to use the left side and one player to use the right.
You begin the game at the bottom of the village, and, if you’re really good, making it from that point to the top can take less than an hour. But you can’t just casually waltz your way up because you came to eat! And eat you shall.
For reasons that will not be explained in any form, stealing enough food as you evade the game’s numerous guards will yield a shiny gold key that can be used to bypass a gate and get to the next part of the village. Thankfully, the path is pretty open to you – there are multiple ways up, and though you need to eat a certain amount of stolen munchies to unlock a gate, food is constantly respawning, allowing even struggling players to find a groove where they can continue to progress. The goal is not only to get to the top and steal the king’s crown, but to get a high score in the process and make it on the leaderboard.
And frankly, at least solo, this game is pretty tough and often hard to survive for even a few minutes. Guards patrol all over the place, often having wide paths that are difficult to predict. All you can do is evade their gaze, hide in bushes, or use a variety of items like a potion to make you run fast, bombs to confuse guards and disappear before they come to, or even dog head masks that make your poochy pursuers briefly think you’re one of them. If you catch just enough of a guard’s vision, be prepared to run, as they’ll aggressively pursue you and do many a leaping jump to catch you in their grasp and end your run. In single player this can result in chaos really quickly – one guard chasing you can turn into two, three, four or more guards chasing you as you desperately find a bush to jump into just out of their field of view.
In multiplayer it’s a bit easier and honestly a bit more fun – if one player gets caught by a guard, that guard will hang onto them like an infant holding his favorite teddy bear and continue to do their patrol while you remain helplessly coddled and unable to perform any mischief. The other player will then need to come to the rescue, bumping into the guard so that player one has a chance to make their escape.
It's all a great time and made all the better by the fact that it’s ludicrously wholesome. Dogs will patrol their paths casually narrating their own footsteps with a joyous, “Bum Bum Bum Bum,” while your crazy little possum, when evading a guard’s capture, will mischievously giggle and go, “na na na na na.” Seeing your possum jump into bushes and reach a hand out to munch on an orange or a loaf of bread is hilarious, and even more hilarious is that eating too much at once will instantly make you an obese possum and greatly slow your running speed until your blistering metabolism is able to catch up a few seconds later.
This is all backed by delightfully goofy animation, with arms flailing behind our characters as they run and stars spinning above the heads of guards that get knocked down. But the world itself has plenty of charm, too, with the whole game looking like scenes from a vibrant, coastal Mediterranean town. It’s wildly chaotic and somehow oddly chill in the same breath.
I love the music, which is very dynamic depending on what’s going on in the game, crescendoing with a wild guard chase and settling back down as you hide in a bush. Presentation-wise, Pizza Possum does a great job all around, with the cherries on top being absolutely perfect ultrawide support and similarly perfect steam deck support, with it running at a smooth 60 fps out of the box.
Make no mistake though – Pizza Possum is a cute, silly, and fun experience, but it’s not an ambitious one. The amount of content in the game is relatively minimal, with mostly collectible munchies and high score chasing there for replayability. And that’s totally ok, but I do want to point out a couple of issues.
One is that climbing is pretty janky. Being able to scale certain objects in the game happens with relative randomness as you walk into them, since there’s no jump button. And whatever physics are at play are certainly not consistent between runs. There were plenty of times I’d scramble over a particular obstacle in one run only to seemingly be completely blocked by it in another, sometimes resulting in me getting caught prematurely from the unpredictability of it all. Another is despite how cute and charming it is, things can start to feel a little repetitive when you’re basically doing the same thing the whole time, just with more guards and trickier circumstances as you make your way closer to the top. Item unlocks do change things up a bit as you play to give you more options, but though drops are frequent, you never really know what you’re going to get and can only hold one consumable item at a time. This is all in the name of the game’s simple, pick up and play nature of course, but does betray a certain shallowness and makes solo play lose its luster after just a couple of hours.
Co-op is where a bit more fun can be had, though I should warn that the way the screen splits up when your two characters get too far from one another can make things in your peripheral a bit too hard to see and make you both do worse as a result. Maybe it’s an intentional design decision to keep things balanced, but it may frustrate some and may discourage too much solo exploration during a coop run.
Ultimately, Pizza Possum is a simple, adorable, short-form game that only costs $6.99, and in my opinion, totally justifies that price for a few hours of cartoony laughs by yourself or with a friend. I wouldn’t go in expecting any more or any less and you’re bound to have a great time with it.
Pros:
+ Absolutely adorable
+ Extremely easy to pick up
+ Great for local coop
+ Very charming presentation
Cons:
- Climbing is a bit janky
- Ultimately somewhat repetitive
Comments