Honk! Pizza Possum is the first game – at least that we can recall – that looks admiringly at Untitled Goose Game and decides that, yep, it fancies a bit of that. Sure, the goose is a possum, but it still positions the player as a deranged animal psychopath, looking to create anarchy through stealing parts of the game world. Behold, the birth of the Animal Stealth genre.
Pizza Possum is not exactly the same, though. Where Untitled Goose Game took its inspiration from graphic adventures, using this-item on that-item to make progress through its sandboxy world, Pizza Possum has more arcade ambitions. Its world is chopped up into regions, and those regions have locked gates. The keys to them are – abstractly – gained by eating enough food in the area. Get stuffed to a sufficient degree, and a key will magically appear in possum’s pockets. Now he can trundle to the next area, like a rodent katamari.
The regions are joined together to create a huge Mediterranean-influenced city that has a king at its zenith. If you manage to get to the king and his cake, well, that’s the Holy Grail. It’s up to you: you can either munch your way through every last stall, beach and ice cream van in a zigzag fashion, ensuring you see everything, or you can head directly for the top.
Complicating this choice are things to find. Giant whirl-looking pastries are tucked into the nooks of the city, and they not only plump up the possum, but they act as the game’s main collectibles. Huge, record-breaking tiramisu and salads are also found on your ascent, and they require a little bit of patience to eat: something you might not have, since there are guards watching for your every move.
Pizza Possum is not as easy as eating everything the eye touches. The kingdom in Pizza Possum has clearly seen your like before, as there are plenty of blue-hatted guards patrolling. Honestly, every other citizen of this town is a guard, so the king is (rightfully) paranoid. Metal Gear Solid fans will know the deal here. There are guards that pivot on the spot, requiring you to wait for them to look away before sneaking behind them. Others are on routes, and the trick is in anticipating them. If they spot you, then you have that small ‘alert’ window – Metal Gear Solid sound effects not included, unfortunately – to find a bush or other hidden spot to take cover. Should you fail to find one, then the chase is on.
Getting caught isn’t the end of the world. There’s a checkpoint system for one, as you can find little cubbyholes with ‘P’ above them that act as save spots. You just return to them and start all over again. But there’s also an XP system, where particularly long stretches of not-getting-caught are rewarded with new tools for you to use. Our favourite was a roadblock, which stopped pursuers in their tracks, but there are espressos, speed-up potions and more as your progress.
The stealth works a treat. For a budget indie game, Pizza Possum is remarkably polished and does all the things you would hope it would do. Guards don’t have any kinds of sixth sense, and you will slip by unnoticed exactly when you expect to. If they are facing one way, you can slip past, millimetres from their back, as long as you are outside of their cone of view. It’s not realistic, but it sure as hell is what you want/expect. They are tenacious if they spot you, but they also have a limit to how far they’re willing to travel. It creates a neat game wherever you get spotted: if you alert someone, you can escape as long as you run away and don’t tag more guards. It’s possible but challenging to score an exit without attracting a third or fourth guard.
Hopefully you can tell from the screenshots, but the presentation, too, is lovely. The Mediterranean setting is unexpected – possums aren’t known from coming from that region – but it’s sunkissed and beautiful, even though it’s constructed from relatively simple geometric shapes. It feels like a real place, with market quarters, an uphill cemetery and docks all exactly where you expect them to be. If we weren’t a wanted possum, we would have liked to explore more freely.
But where Pizza Possum falls down a little is the game’s structure. It seems stuck between too many stools. We’re not sure if it wants to be a roguelike, sending you on runs through the city; a score attack game; or something more career-oriented. That lack of focus leads to several conflicts, and it ended up hurting our enjoyment.
For example, getting caught in Pizza Possum is positively encouraged. You get whisked back to a checkpoint with some accrued XP, perhaps an unlock. But all the gates that you previously unlocked will now be locked again, their keys presumably returned to the food that you previously ate.
Now, we can’t help but feel that this sucks. We played Pizza Possum with a bit of a completionist, exploration-focused approach. We wanted to see the whole city. We wanted to eat everything it had to offer. It’s a bit of a labyrinth, so we used the gates as orientation: if there was a locked gate, we hadn’t been there. So we would gorge ourselves like a marsupial glutton and earn enough points to pass on through.
But with the gates resetting, we couldn’t orient by the gates any more. And we couldn’t return to old regions to take a different fork in the road. Or, at least, we could, but we’d have to complete them and find their keys over and over again.
All of this led us to think that we were playing Pizza Possum wrong. That we were treating it as a discrete, completable game, when the emphasis was more on racing to the top, or getting better with each run. But playing it that way is equally unsatisfying. You are gobbling up the same regions, over and over, with no variation or joy in doing so. You can’t blitz to the top, either: we know as we’ve tried. The guards are so densely packed in the King’s palace that you must have certain power ups to eat his cake. But those power-ups only come from prolonged play. The ‘rush to the top’ doesn’t work either.
We don’t quite know how developers Cozy Computer wanted us to play Pizza Possum, but we never quite landed on it. Eventually, we repeated areas and ground out enough XP to get a power-up that would let us face the King and finally finish Pizza Possum. But we wouldn’t recommend that path: while we finally ate everything there was to eat, we didn’t enjoy it as much as we could have. We felt like we were missing something.
There’s so much that we loved about Pizza Possum. It’s got that cheeky, subversive edge that Untitled Goose Game has, and we revelled in causing chaos. You can literally taste the success as you bypass several guards and down the giant sundae they were guarding.
But we can’t help but feel that developers Cosy Computer hit upon a winning formula and then didn’t know what to do with it. Is Pizza Possum a roguelike? An arcade rush game? A campaign? The answer, we suspect, is a little bit of all of them. And that confusion left something of a bad taste in this possum’s mouth.
