My hunger for low-res grounded pixel games lately opened me up to a stellar sale on a game called Pizza Express. Pizza Express is an indie pixel-graphic pizzeria simulator about a fast-paced solo restaurant run by animal friends Gastone the cat and Lucky the rabbit–and also you.
The game is fairly simple but incorporates playful dialogue and gameplay that is quirky in the best indie-adhering ways. It is very similar to the game Good Pizza, Great Pizza, but is older and definitely a bit more grassroots.
I enjoyed it very much, so I’ve decided to bring this review of it together for your reference. Please enjoy.
This game is available on Steam.
Wet Your Appetite With Pizza Express
Savory morsels of focaccia and Margherita, marinara, incredible but real pizza ingredients like tuna, etc! There’s plenty to learn in Pizza Express, but the basics you already know. The pixel art nature of the game indulges retro but gastronomic graphics for the most part, and darn if that two-tone focaccia didn’t make my mouth water. Less is more, but style is everything.
Life is simple at the pizzeria. The tutorial lasts a good fifteen minutes or so but is interactive enough that the skills you learn are as fun as the core gameplay, just with fewer recipes. Your job is to make your pizzeria famous by working up the ranks for F.L.A.B., the Finger Lickin’ Associated Bistros. You have 30 days to go big, and it’s all about your skills as a pizza cook! Also, note, you can name your pizzeria straight from the get-go. I opted for “Mr. Dave Pizza.”
Make your pizza orders as quickly as you can before the timer runs out, and make up to 6 pizzas at a time. Try not to waste ingredients, because pizza’s not made of money! Also, orders can stack up so you could have to make several pizzas under the same timer.
Making pizza in the game utilizes a simple mouse and keyboard system involving mousing over orders to see how they’re made, a nice help most of the time. Ingredient buckets are labeled with a number for quality. If you reach close to 5 or less you need to order more from the stocker by right-clicking. Orders take around 30-60 seconds, so try to time things best you can. I honestly didn’t see any reason you can’t restock straight away, but you may have to test this out.
Features of Pizza Express
- Create and design pizza flavors
- Retro Graphics
- Play in management mode and corner the market
- Available in English and Italian
- 50 ingredients
- Many original characters, for better or worse
- An original narrative
How This Game Feeds My Hunger
I glanced over this game many times, being not sure about the log of all things, which you shouldn’t do honestly, but the game is a sturdy effort and it holds up just fine–perhaps more so than it would have before for me.
There’s another game I have played that is newer called Good Pizza, Great Pizza (link here). The two games are very similar, but most cooking games are and I wouldn’t take it as a slight toward either, and honestly, there’s no need to compare.
I believe we are starting to reach a threshold where the age of indie games is not necessarily relevant to their selling points unless you’re deliberately seeking out such things, but that is fine too. Pizza Express has retro cred and is simple yet fun. As a pizza non-expert/semi-expert it addresses the fun of pizza-themed entertainment totally fine.
So, I’ve spent a decent amount of time playing, long enough to give it my approval and send you on your way to the till. I’ve just realized that if you have stumbled here because you wanted to order a pizza, I do apologize, you can order pizza at pizzahut.com.
Otherwise. Hmm, what else is there to say about this? When you play games as much as me, you start to appreciate simpler graphics and more playful game tasks. Pull anything out of the hat, and we both know how much things have changed over the past half-decade. Games like this need to be preserved because they tell us something about society, and especially gaming throughout the world’s constant renewal.
Satisfied
Well, that’s it. I spent this whole day writing a review of this seven-year-old pizza game for you. Why not? The more I run across games I like, I see there is a need for coverage because they’re timeless.
I hope you enjoyed this article. If you’d like to enjoy more content please have a look around and read Mr. Dave Pizza as much as you like. I update generally once a week now. I’d like to cover more food games soon, but feel free to leave a comment below with a suggestion or whatever you’d like really.
Thank you for reading. Enjoy your ‘za.
Oh, and here is a direct link to the humble bundle page for this game where you can purchase and make as much pixel pizza as you like: https://www.humblebundle.com/store/pizza-express?partner=mrdavepizza
