88) Death Noodle Delivery (2024)

Developed by Italian studio Stupid Pixel, Death Noodle Delivery began with the fairly simple premise of combining the arcade classic Paperboy with a dystopian, cyberpunk future. While the idea of delivering papers in even our modern era seems a bit odd, the conceit of delivering food, in this case noodles, helps to update the general premise. The game does a pretty good job of bringing the classic arcade action to modern audiences, delivering it with a side of cynicism and humor that help to establish and identity all of its own.

We play as Jimmy, a hoverboard rider who has just started his job delivering noodles for, wait for it, the Death Noodle Delivery restaurant. The job entails riding our board down the busy street, flinging orders to marked customers. Along the way, we must avoid obstacles and do our best not to crash. Deviating from the formula of the game that inspired it, we have an unlimited amount of noodles that we can toss, using them to help eliminate obstacles in addition to doling them out to hungry customers. After each shift, we ride our board home as violently angry pizza delivery drivers attempt to run us down, which seems a bit excessive, but it is a dystopian nightmare future. Once we make it back to our rundown apartment building, we get the chance to speak to our neighbors, seeing how shitty life is for everyone else, while discovering what new calamity has rendered our toilet inoperable.

The game follows this simple gameplay loop with each new day bringing new challenges and introducing us to new upgrades and mechanics. The noodle delivery sections, while the most straightforward, offer the best sense of progressing difficulty with each day bringing more hungry customers and more obstacles. Ending each day in our crummy apartment allows us to interact with an eclectic group cast of residents that help flavor the world while providing the bulk of the humor. The middle sections, in which we're tasked with surviving our trip home, weight the experience down a bit. It's not so much that these sections aren't interesting, they just come off as less polished with odd spikes in difficulty while also serving little to expand upon the world.

While the game is relatively short, seeing us play through a total of seven in game days, I feel compelled to lament the final few stages. The final delivery section is an absolute gauntlet of obstacles and enemies that puts how well you've mastered the mechanics of the game to the test. While a bit frustrating in how much the difficulty spikes, it still comes off as mostly a fair test of skill. I cannot say the same for the final section of the game, which is probably the most unfair and oddly balanced nightmare of a level that I've experienced in recent memory. While I won't profess to being a master gamer and while I have nothing against challenging gameplay, this final section pushed me to wit's end. The issue, I feel, is twofold, as there are mechanics and abilities that are completely useless, while all of the obstacles and enemies are spawned in direct relation to the player. When a game that focuses on learning patterns and behaviors throws that away in favor of just placing shit in your way to cause the maximum amount of challenge, and when the goal is to simply survive to an endpoint where the game can spawn obstacles directly prior, it becomes a frustrating exercise in patience.

Death Noodle Delivery does a lot of things right. I love the atmosphere and writing, and the majority of the game is well balanced and fun to experience. It's rare that I feel hesitant to recommend a game simply because of one section or level, yet I'm compelled to when the overall experience is as relatively short as this. If you're going to play a game that's only a few hours long, having one section stand out as unbalanced certainly weighs a bit heavier. Still, I enjoyed most of my time with the game, and I'm sure there are plenty of people who would love the one section that I disliked. Death Noodle Delivery is by no means a bad game, and does more than enough right while executing on its novel premise.