You’ve heard of the pizza rat , but now there’s the Pizza Possum. Contrary to popular belief, opossums are nice and gentle creatures. As such, the game actually portrays them correctly, as scavengers. There’s no malice or malcontent, just the possum wants some pizza, and by golly, you’re gonna do it. It’s a simple concept, baked wonderfully for a golden experience. Pizza Possum may not set the world on fire, but it will be great for some quick games either solo or with a friend.
It doesn’t take much for things to get going in Pizza Possum , but thankfully the story is simple enough: a possum smells pizza at the castle, and wants it. That’s it. But this power and lust of pizza is a cautionary tale. If you want pizza, you gotta pay for it. If you try to steal anything, you’ll get in big trouble.
Pizza Possum is basically a one-button game. Your goal is to get all the way to the pizza, eat it, and force them to give you the crown, but it’s just as good to get as far as you can. I managed to grab the crown within an hour of playing. Do this three times and there’s something special in it for you. If caught, you go back to the last checkpoint. As you traverse the level, enemies have an exclamation point that fills up like a meter. This lets you know they’re suspicious, if it gets completely full they will give chase. If you run by certain police dogs, they will whistle to call in reinforcements. So long as you can break line-of-sight, you have a chance to hide in bushes and let things calm down.
There’s a roguelite-light element to Pizza Possum. You’ll earn a score as eat food, get keys to unlock gates, access news areas, and work your way to the top. This score is reset upon getting caught, but if you’ve saved at a checkpoint, then you’ll spawn at that checkpoint with whatever gates have been unlocked at that point. Along the way, there are some oversized meals that the pizza possum can chew on, and it’s a careful balance of wanting to eat it fully, but also not get caught. It’s essentially a high score chasing game as well. Upon capture, you’re also unlock new items to aid you in getting to the top faster and easier. For instance there are barriers you can drop to slow down pursuers, a potion to run faster, or smoke that you can drop to stop the dog police in their tracks while you escape. The unlocks all feel meaningful, and new dimensions to the gameplay – in that way, it makes it worth getting caught early on so you have more tools at your disposal. There are fourteen items to unlock, and twenty collectibles to find.
There isn’t a map, because it’s not a very large area, but it’s one of those things that would be nice. I love all the little details in Pizza Possum , as they have gameplay implications. For instance, eat too much and the possum gets fat, and movement is slowed until the food is digested a bit. Jumping into the water means this also slows your movement, so you have to be strategic in where you go.
This is a game that can be played in local co-op. So bring a friend for up to two players to coordinate stealing food and optimizing your route to the top the fastest. Or if you’ve got the right kind of friend, they’ll make things extremely chaotic and problematic, alerting all the guards everywhere they go.
Pizza Possum supports keyboard & mouse and even ultrawide monitors with no fuss. I did find playing the game with a controller was much more natural of an experience. The game has a wonderful, soft aesthetic of colorful pastels accompanied by a jazzy soundtrack. It all melds together in the right ways.
Pizza Possum has more than enough meat to satisfy. It’s a game that you might be done in two to four hours, but for the price, it’s really fun. This is one of those games that just about anyone can pick-up and play. It’s a rare kind of game that doesn’t too much out of you, and you can get a lot of enjoyment from it with each person you introduce to it. Pizza Possum is bite-sized game with meal-sized fun, and it truly delivers.
A Steam code was provided by the publisher for review purposes
