PEGBRJE: No Delivery (and Extras)
Think FNAF except death means you’re a new person entirely.
No Delivery is hard to categorize — best description of it would be a ‘procedurally generated horror rpg adventure’, but that’s a mouthful. Developed by Oates, this pizza joint hires employees regularly as they keep getting killed off during the night shifts. It is your job as all of the employees to operate the night shift, exploring the pizzeria and cleaning it up while trying not to get sidetracked or murdered. Each ‘run’ of a nightshift either starts with a new employee (cuz, y’know, the murder) or the previous employee if they survived the night, where you can gather upgrades, items, and intel on the world of late night pizza places.
No Delivery is easily one of the more unique titles I’ve played in terms of genre fusion, as rarely do so many differing elements ever end up meshing together well. The main portion of the game is wandering the halls of the pizzeria, cleaning up messes with brooms, razers and your hands while also collecting items left behind. Presents can contain useful items needed for later, or just some more trash to sell to the garbage bins. Employee items, as told by your faceless employer, are transferred to the next employee upon termination, so all items are safe unless used. What isn’t safe is if you get side tracked.
Being ‘side tracked’ in No Delivery is just like in real life; you go on an arduous journey through dangerous territory and die to evil monsters. Joking aside, the entirety of the procedural generation is built within these side tracked missions, having the employee go through zones to escape from their ‘side tracked’ state. Unlike in real life, where your boss just finds you sitting in the ball pit, No Delivery personifies this as an arduous campaign of death and uncertainty. Each room has the potential for a monster to appear and you must be prepared to fight it to continue. If you are lucky, you can defeat it before the ball pit monster kills you. If it begins to go sour, you have the option of attempting to escape, just like in Pokemon and other turnbased RPGs. Get too unlucky, and you die then and there, and the cycle of employees churns again.
The employees themselves are also subjugated to this ‘rogue-like’ design as not only are they random, but they have varying job titles and stats. One of my earlier and longer runs was as a dog (yes an actual puppy) who’s job was ‘mascot’. Also I could talk, but that detail seems to be just part of the game. My dog had stats about how fun they were and what special attacks they could do, similarly to getting rolled a new character. These varying job titles can also be upgraded by finding the job pamphlets and manuals throughout the pizza place that can give better skills and stats, so you might find that being a mascot can get you to one place farther than the assistant.
Surviving your side tracked death trap allows you to automatically survive the night, and perform daytime duties as well to make more cash. This is just a set of scenarios set within the pizza place, and your choices can either cost you cash, give you cash, or get you beaten up by random thugs and lose life. Once your money is made (or lost), the game returns to the managers office, where you can choose to continue or fire the current employee. Perhaps you hope to get the Mascot again for their new ability you picked up, or perhaps the current employee is too traumatized to continue onwards. Either way, you’re firing them, not killing them. So they at least get to survive.
So to summarize, No Delivery gives players the constant rotation of new employees with different stats and jobs to clean during a night shift only for them to get sucked into random and fatal nightmares made by their own inability to stay on task. The only thing that’s for certain is that this pizza joint refuses to deliver, and there are a lot of terrifying people still in this arcade after hours. To say that it’s different is an understatement.
For those looking for a fantastical and intriguing variation to a FNAF styled game, give No Delivery a try. It has quite the atmosphere of bizarre mystery horror as many of the things attempting to kill your employees are rarely direct or plainly visible at first glance. It’s not a long adventure through this horror game, but it’ll have you burning through employees enough to cause a revolt.
Links, as always, are below. At least, that’s what I’d normally state.
But we aren’t done yet.
With the completion of page 1 of the Racial Justice and Equality bundle now complete, there are a few items that I didn’t look at due to their nature. Some were asset packs, some were experimentals. They will be listed below.
Kenney Game Assets 1
An asset pack made by Kenney for 20 000 different items for 3D and 2D.
Lancer Core Book: First Edition
A system book to create worlds where humanity has reached the stars and pilot mechas with prompts, outlines and more.
Mu Cartographer
An experimental game that I wasn’t sure I could give an overview of since I wasn’t entirely able to get it running in the way I expected. Gives you tools to generate shifting land masses.
