The Pizza Delivery Boy Who Saved the World Review

The Pizza Delivery Boy Who Saved the World tells the story of 26-year-old Doug Rivers (or whatever you decide to name him) working as an underpaid pizza delivery boy under an unappreciative boss. One day, a familiar stranger saves the protagonist from another tongue-lashing from the pizza shop owner. Why did a stranger come to Doug’s aid?

The Pizza Delivery Boy Who Saved the World is a unique entry in the visual novel genre. Most visual novel experiences are anime or cartoons, so having one set with “real” people in real environments is quite the left of the normalcy of the genre.

As you’d expect from a visual novel experience, The Pizza Delivery Boy Who Saved the World has no gameplay mechanics except for making decisional and conversational choices when prompted to. While it does feel like you have narrative control, they don’t feel as impactful like how to cut pizzas or whether or not to make small talk with a regular customer. Also, the Achievements give little to no reason to play this more than once.

The presentation is pretty subpar. The characters are clearly photographs that haven’t been taken under the same lighting so when you see more than one character on screen, it looks like a botched Photoshop project. Environments are clearly on green screen and some look a bit pixelated. The soundtrack is atrocious and clearly isn’t representative of the overall feel of the visual novel experience. Also for whatever reason, when characters walk away, it sounds like they are wearing boots made from cement and they are walking on wood.

While visual novels aren’t perfect, it sounds like they were aiming pretty low here. There is a blatant story-wise issue where the current day, the 26-year-old protagonist looks actually older than the future version, estimated to be 56 years old, of the protagonist. Couldn’t they make a little effort? Even with Photoshop? Even with real characters, the editing and montage make it difficult to take this seriously. Also, choices feel unimpactful; aside from getting achievements.

I don’t know if this game is a joke on purpose or if they wanted to achieve the same cult status as Night Trap on Sega CD years from now, but either way, they failed. While the story and subsequent twist make for a mildly enjoyable romp, none of the characters are enjoyable. Fans of visual novels will be curious to enjoy a non-anime VN, however, newcomers to the genre might be put off by this game. This game only applies to die-hard fans of Visual Novels. If you’ve never attempted a VN experience, look elsewhere.