I won’t deny that upon arriving at Raw Fury’s booth at PAX East this year, I felt an initial tinge of disappointment. Having seeinggreater furyfrom them last year, followed bygreatest furylater on, maybe I had just set the bar too high, or maybe it’s because they had to split their showcases between PAX East and GDC, the latter getting to seeCassette BeastsandMoonstone Island. Meanwhile, at PAX East, we had the reveal of a game called…Pizza Possum? Okay, maybe it was ridiculous to expect greatester fury, and the booth still had Friends vs. Friends and the new Dome Keeper update, but was something called Pizza Possum actually notable enough to be Raw Fury’s big PAX East game?
Well, if you saw our list ofthe Top Ten Games of PAX East 2023,then you’d know that’s obviously a rhetorical question. Developed by Cosy Computer and having spawned from little more than a drawing of a cute little cartoon possum, Pizza Possum is a classic arcade-style game that’s simple in concept, but incredibly fun in execution. The setup is simple: you’re a possum, you want food, you head out to nab food from people and devour it, all while avoiding the various guard dogs in your way. You walk around with the analog stick, automatically eating any food you come near, and you have one other button to push for any items you pick up (like an energy drink to temporarily run faster, unlocked after scoring enough points over time). It doesn’t get much more simple than that.
Where Pizza Possum builds off of its concept and succeeds ever further beyond basic arcade fun, though, is in the way things properly escalate. As you hunt around your picturesque seaside town, you also have to you also have to grab keys to unlock gates that lead to new sections of the town. What order this is done in is entirely up to you, being able to open whatever gates are available for available for unlocking at the time. It’s impressive level design, especially as later sections add more vertical bits as you find ways to climb on rooftops, different kinds of guards to deal with and huge dishes of food like cheese wheels and fruit spreads that require you to linger by them to have chunks of them drop off, potentially increasing your chances of getting caught.
The guards require you to take advantage of the stealth elements as well, trying to stay out of their range of vision of jumping into bushes when caught. It can be quite the hectic and fun blast of gameplay when trying to outrun a whole pack of dogs, especially as you can also be harmed by such elements as weight gain that can slow you down for a bit if you eat too much food at once, which against is automatically attracted to you. And as time goes one, more and more guards seem to begin patrolling, even in previous areas, making things trickier, and keeping the challenge level perfectly escalated. But you can’t avoid the five-o forever, though, and once they pounce on you, it’s game over as your score is tallied up and we see if any new bonuses have been unlocked.
And really, that’s all there is to Pizza Possum right now, though we have yet to see other additions like the co-op mode and other tools such as smoke bombs, or more hidden passages and bits of stealth. But even based on what was shown so far, Pizza Possum feels like a perfect twist on classic arcade gameplay, topped off with a cute and charming style with a perfect Mediterranean-esque atmosphere. So this is indeed another blast of impressive fury in its own way, and one worth checking out when it arrives on all major platforms later this year.
