The judgment of some animals is extremely bad. While a quiet, slow, funny-looking sloth sneaks into hearts right away, a snarling, rat-like opossum, for example, can evoke negative feelings. It is no different in the video game Pizza Possum, where the neighborhood is terrorized by a hungry mouth. The no-nonsense opossum’s favorite food is stolen food, so he aims to eat the giant pizza of the kingdom inhabited by dogs in front of his dignity, the chihuahua.
You only have one life in this two-player skill game; if you get caught, you lose some progress. The track is structured in such a way that you get a single, fixed screen divided into zones by quotation marks. Imagine a huge panorama, where we are moving upwards, but we always only see the given lane. These are separated by gates, which can always be opened with a key. Getting a key is easy, you just have to gobble up the food on the level until the meter is full. And that’s really it, after opening the gate, we have to continue eating when we reach the new city level (the next zone usually has several gates, if you open one, its neighbors are also revealed). There is a lot of food in the stuff, from bread to sweets, our greedy stomach sucks in everything, and for a few moments we gain weight unintentionally, which slows us down.
Citizens are loitering everywhere, and they don’t take kindly to us taking possessions away. In such cases, they grab us and restrain us, and then we end up in the clutches of a passing gendarme. It’s worse if these units start chasing you by default, because they are quite fierce and hard to shake off. Private hounds (haha) prancing around in balloon jackets, spotting us, blow their whistles, and the smaller carpet cruisers annoyingly stick to and rat on the big ones.
We will fail many times, but we can touch many checkpoints on the mentioned levels, so we do not start from the beach, but from the given track section. We are constantly collecting points, so we unlock a lot of stuff that makes the adventure easier. Not easy, just more advanced, for example, by putting on a dog mask, we can blend in for a few seconds, or with a smoke grenade, we can outrun our attackers for a few moments. You have to play a lot to get all the stuff, and our things appear as random items in boxes all over the map. We can only have one at a time, so we have to be tactical.
You can quickly get to the top of the island, where the giant pizza is located, but eating it is difficult, and the last 2-3 levels are already a bit crowded. Before that, we run in larger spaces with lots of escape routes and hiding places. Arriving at the castle, it is almost impossible to complete the program without a few well-drawn items. If we succeed, we get a crown and the whole game starts over. In this case, we lose the crown after the first failure, and the goal would be to play three perfect games, which is very difficult (I succeeded twice).
When playing with two players, the split screen is a bit confusing; if one of us is bitten, the other can still knock the other out of the dog’s paw. After a while playing with my partner, it was all about saving each other all the time. We couldn’t really work together properly, software that was simple on paper was too difficult for him. It is interesting that the second player can control not an opossum, but a bandit, i.e. a raccoon.
Pizza Possum’s graphics look like a panorama of an art exhibition, which isn’t pin-sharp. There are also some sound effects, the squeals of the animals are cute, as we step in front of someone or swallow something bigger, our hooligans “comment”. They kindly shovel in the exotic food, which also sells out spectacularly. I couldn’t mention much else, the whole thing really gives itself from the first minute, and we get quite a lot of freedom almost until the end.
Pizza Possum is a short game, but can be played multiple times. With its friendly price tag, it can be promising if someone would like to hang out in the company of a not too complex but slightly challenging indie.
The test copy was provided by the game publisher.