Pizza Possum Review

You're a hungry possum, and nothing tastes better than a stolen pizza. In Pizza Possum, you take control of an extraordinarily hungry possum (and raccoon for co-op mode) as you embark on an impossible quest to dodge the dog guards, eat all of the food, and steal the crown from Bella Chonki.

Pizza Possum takes no time to start up and gives you a simple goal: run through the entire village and eat Bella Chonki's pizza. Why? Well, not only is our dear protagonist hungry, but also, stolen pizza just tastes better. And stolen oranges. And stolen spaghetti. Did we mention stolen pizza?

What ensues is chaotic running around as you run, hide, and devour everything in your wake. The gameplay is relatively simple, with light stealth elements as you need to hide from the guard dogs and eat all of the food that you can. The more you eat, the higher the score goes, and after feasting on a certain amount of edibles, you eventually unlock a one-time-use key that lets you go to the next region, face the next couple of guards, and try to eat your way to the next one.

As you traverse the land and earn points, you will eventually be caught — it's pretty inevitable, considering the sheer amount of guard dogs and the criminal amounts of stolen food you'll have to eat. After a hilarious scream, it'll be your job to find a safe space by running away and hiding in bushes, which is a relatively simple task in the first few regions but becomes far more challenging the closer to Bella Chonki you get. Get caught, however, and it's "game over".

Scattered throughout the world are checkpoints, and once the guards have finally gotten their paws on you, it'll be time to restart from one of these. The amount of points you acquired dictates how much score you earned and, thus, which new items you can use against the canine police. This adds a bit of a progression feel to Pizza Possum, where you are expected to get caught at least a few times as you unlock crucial items that will help you sneak and escape all the more possible. In fact, I'm pretty convinced it's impossible to eat all of Bella Chonki's pizza until you have the fourth item, but that just might be me being bad at stealth.

Now, as a person who abhors all things stealth and often chooses the path of chaos and murder when given the opportunity, I didn't actually mind Pizza Possum's elements because they don't feel as restrictive as you might expect. Different guards have different vision ranges, patterns, and even abilities that they use when they see you, but it was all so simple and straightforward that it didn't feel like a bad thing — Pizza Possum remains as a hectic arcade game first over anything else, and that's a good thing. Higher elements of difficulty might have made it more challenging to enjoy, but it definitely feels like a title that could potentially be loved by everyone.

It took me about 35 minutes to steal Bella Chonki's first pizza and crown, which also included learning the map, getting caught by the guards, learning the controls, and unlocking new items. Thenceforth, the game gives you a new challenge: steal two more crowns without being caught (a total of three if you do), and you will get the "Tasty" ending. You see, Bella knows to keep an extra couple of crowns around just in case, as they are no stranger to thieving possums. And you're still hungry, so add two and two, and you get a triple-crowned possum with three pizzas to eat.

This does mean that the guards become a bit more fierce and numerous, but to acquire the final ending, you'll have to pass without getting caught, which is easier than it sounds. Once you learn the map and important areas that have high concentrations of food, it's a bit easier to target those specifically to unlock keys faster. After another 10 minutes, I gathered my second of three crowns.

This does mean that Pizza Possum is a very short title, depending on your skill, chaos level, and whether you play co-op or not. On the low end, it's about an hour or two, whilst for those who want to 100% by getting all of the items, food, and three crowns, you might see an extra hour or two depending on your capability to learn maps and your individual stealth skill.

As an arcade title, Pizza Possum is pretty simplistic, and what you see is what you get. For better or worse, the title isn't really much more complex than what you see on paper, which is a stealth arcade title where you run around eating things, learning the village layout, and stealing the crown three times to get the Tasty ending.