Food Boy wishes only to deliver pizza, but the twerkers won’t let him

Fortunately, pizza is a weapon

Image credit: Short N’ Sweet

During his tenure as the foremost newsperson of the 1980s, Atari’s Paperboy faced many grievous challenges – squabbling drunks, swarms of bees, the actual Grim Reaper – and yet, day after day he answered the noble call of journalism, lashing his basket to his doughty BMX and daring the treacherously oblique suburbs of Reaganite America.

Speaking as both a news editor and a former paperboy, who broke his mind and body hauling obese Sunday editions to the millionaire houses at the top of the valley, Paperboy is my role model. Or he would be if my role model weren’t actually Steven Spielberg’s Freakazoid. Paperboy’s heyday has long since passed into history, however, and the business of journalism has changed beyond recognition. People don’t read newspapers anymore, they just eat pizza. This, at least, is the condensed analysis offered by Food Boy, which launched this week on Steam.

Food Boy – Official Release Trailer

Watch on YouTube

Food Boy should be called Pizza Boy, of course. I assume he isn’t called Pizza Boy because either 1) some other game is called Pizza Boy or 2) Pizza Boy is also the name of a Game Boy Advance emulator, and Food Boy has cares enough without the prospect of getting accidentally shanked by Nintendo’s lawyers. He inhabits a world in which people are so famished for deep dish that going without it for mere seconds drives them absolutely berserk, causing them to gallop after Food Boy cursing and wailing and collide with him so violently it causes a nuclear explosion. My working thesis is that either Food Boy or his world are made of antimatter.

Fortunately, Food Boy has weapons to wield against these pie-eyed maniacs. His weapons are: pizza. It turns out that the only way to repel people maddened by the lack of pizza is to hit them with pizza, for Poison Was The Cure. Look, Food Boy didn’t ask to be born into this hateful, contradictory cosmos. He just wants to cycle along lines of twinkling collectible CDs, do jumps off ramps and listen to hip hop. He dreams of a better life for his children someday, once all the pizza has achieved deliverance, and all the pizza-lovers are either sated or slain.

Food Boy’s other trials and tribulations include rowdy dogs, bouncing basketballs, discourteously thrown boomerangs, and sudden turns in the road which reveal this deceptively slanted world for a 3D model – a polygonal confection that would surely have struck the god-fearing Paperboy as blasphemous, because Paperboy, after all, operates diagonally and so do bishops in chess and look, just roll with it already. Food Boy’s greatest foes, however, are the twerkers. They loiter in the road cheeks a-chapping, buttocking after him with bumly irreverence, not necessarily obstructing Food Boy but certainly luring his eye from the prize and reminding him of the GTA 6 trailer and causing him to pedal straight into a basketball.

Distractions like these might not be so disastrous if Food Boy weren’t encumbered with a terrible control scheme, which feels like it was built for touchscreens. It is not enough to push a button, as Paperboy once did – pizza must be launched like an elastic band, by dragging the cursor back from Food Boy’s harried form and releasing. Time slows during the procedure, but it’s fiddly nonetheless because Food Boy lurks at the bottom of the screen. I think this is sensible behaviour, given the constant risk of explosive assault, but it also means there isn’t enough room to drag back the cursor, and in any case, you also explode if you aim pizza for too long. The whole thing is just, deeply mysterious to me.

Food Boy isn’t a great game, though it has a certain flair. I’ve written about it partly because I committed valuable time to playing the Steam demo, and partly because I love the idea of the Paperboy format being applied to different neighbourhoods, sprinkled across the spacetime continuum. Can somebody do one for 90s Yorkshire next? Because I have much advice to give. I’m pretty sure I could flatten a twerker with a Sunday paper.