Troglobytes games, Stupidi Pixel, and Tiny Pixel have revealed that Death Noodle Delivery, a severely nihilistic game about gig work, is coming to PS4, PS5, Switch, and Xbox Series X|S ?on July 31.

Death Noodle Delivery on PC this past April. I reviewed it around launch and found it to be a hauntingly nihilistic and depressing game about the world’s decline in the face of endless crises and unchecked technological advancement. It takes the core premise of Paperboy and twists it to present its dark underbelly. It also ties in some the??matically crude themes to hammer its points home. It’s distressingly effective.

You play as Jimmy, who is just trying to make ends meet in an uncaring world. He takes a job delivering noodles to people on the street, but each day brings more challenges as society quickly declines and his dignity as a human gets d??ragged across the pavement.

The core gameplay in Death Noodle Delivery is a rather simplistic take on Paperboy, but most of the focus is on exploring Jimmy’s apartment block and talking to his neighbors. I mention this in my review, but if you just want to play Paperboy, then don’t bother. It is worth noting that one of my biggest complaints was the difficulty balancing, which h?as been addressed through multip?le patches. If you’re up for an effective and pessimistic perspective on the world today, then definitely check it out.

In fact, I hope that the console release means that more peop??le will try it out. It’s something that should be experienced.

Death Noodle Delivery is out now on PC. It?? releases for PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and Switch on July 31, 2024.

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I dream of noodles. They’re the most frequent imagery in my dreams, even moreso than the test I didn’t study for, or the homework that’s 20 years late, or all my teeth falling out. I don’t fully dig dream interpretation, b?ut theyâ€?™re generally a comforting presence. Warmth in the cold.

I also associate them with the cyberpunk genre. Cyberpunk used to be the pessimistic vision of the future, showing one of the worst-case scenarios for human advancement. And yet, most of what works in the genre depicted is somehow way better than w?here we are now. At best, a work in the cyberpunk aesthetic may have predicted what we’re dealing with now, and at worst, it was overly optimistic about how we’d apply ou??r technological endeavors.

Death Noodle Delivery fixes that. It utilizes its cyberpunk aesthetic to show a world that is at ??least as bad as what we’re dealing with in reality. At least.

Death Noodle Delivery (PC [Reviewed])
Developer: Stupidi Pixel, Tiny Pixel
Publisher: Troglobytes Games
Released: April 4, 2024
MSRP: $4.99

I’m not sure the developer of Paperboy intended the game to be as satirical as it turned out to be in retrospect. In it, you’d play as a hapless youth delivering newspapers with? the pressure of keeping or losing subscribers as they ride their route. Newspaper delivery was, for a lot of generations, sort of the bottom-most of bottom rungs. It was done by children who couldn’t yet work at companies or elderly people whose pensions didn’t cover the bills.

But in Paperboy your main objective is to survive a single week. Your route is populated by increasingly more deadly obstacles. Sometimes it’s runaway baby carriages or children playing in their driveway, but it escalates until the Grim Reaper �Castlevania villain and death inc??arnate �is chasing you down the street. All for enough money to maybe?? rent a game for the weekend.

Death Noodle Delivery takes the concept further. You play as Jimmy, who is struggling to make ends meet. The world is turning to shit around him, he can’t afford his own method of escapism, and the people around him can’t help because they’re largely in the same situation he is. Finally, the temp agency he’s signed up with lands him a job as?? a noodle delivery boy, and if ??he can survive until the end of the week, he’ll finally get paid. Maybe then he’ll be able to buy more drugs to cope with the pain of existence.

Surviving until the end of the week is a tall order. That’s not only because noodle delivery is a thankless, hazardous job, but also because the world is heaving out the last few drops of vomit before it will roll over and die an embarrassing death on?? the bathroom floor. War, a financial crisis, disease, a robot uprising; each day everything gets worse and worse.

But Jimmy’s only?? option is to keep making ends ?meet.

While the core gameplay of Death Noodle Delivery is an isometric-ish Paperboy-esque delivery route where you hurl packages of noodles at glowing c??ustomers on the street, it’s less about the noodle deliver?y and more about the struggles of Jimmy’s life. It’s more of a narrative game than an arcade-like title.

Each day, beaten and exhausted, Jimmy returns home. And each day, he finds his toilet broken, stolen, or otherwise out of commission, and no one will lend him theirs. What seems on the surface like it’s just some juvenile potty humor actually hammers home a point: Jimmy is so far down in society that he’s robbed of even basic human dignity. Indeed, there are some amusing moments in Death Noodle Delivery, but while it looks like a quirky, weird tit?le, it is, in truth, extremely depressing.

It’s depressing because it’s? so easy to see yourself in Jimmy’s shoes. Each year that goes by, the world becomes more and more difficult to merely exist in. Employers will pay the bare minimum for even experienced workers, and it’s not enough to meet the rising costs of life, which seem to be hastening at an alarming rate. Your only way out is to have been born fortunate enough to have had a chance at an education, and even then, you’re often not valued unless you already were provided access to certain social circles. What’s worse is that the people who are where they are, simply because they were born into specific circumstances, will look down on you.

And each year that goes by, the ?world seems to ??fall apart a bit more. Social upheaval, wealth inequality, war, unfettered technological advances; it’s hard to stay optimistic, especially when we’ve trained ourselves to constantly be plugged. We’ve built our own Hell.

If there’s one silver lining to this, it’s that Death Noodle Delivery is so effective at capturing this Hell. Each loading screen depicts some uncomfortable creation of photo manipulation underscored by an often nihilistic quote. ??The environment around Jimmy feels so inhuman, showing a world more comfortable for technology than the humans that created it. You can tangibly feel the weight on Jimmy’s shoulder as he returns home.

Unfortunately, this swells to ?a punctuation point that is equally as nihilistic as the game it?self. It doesn’t have a hopeful message at the end, perhaps because, like most of us, the creators don’t have an answer to the problems depicted. Without spoiling anything, the conclusion feels as though it was carefully built toward, but it is also, perhaps, a step too far.

I could have done without it, but what really soured the ending for me was the hellish sequence that caps everything off. I nearly played through Death Noodle Delivery in one sitting before hitting the wall at its end. The difficulty suddenly leaps into the air, and what was once a narrative game with light Paperboy elements becomes a brutal gauntlet. Maybe there’s a? message ?behind even that. I don’t know. I was too enraged to really take it all in.

Death Noodle Delivery is a weird game to have to recommend. The actual game within it �which is to say, the Paperboy sequences �are such a miniscule part of its appeal. If that’s what interests you, then don’t bother. Those sequences ??are not the core of the ex??perience; rather, they’re here to support the narrative.

The narrative itself is nihilistic and depressing. For all its fantastical elements, strange abstractions, and other weirdness, it does not tell a happy story. It’s not mired in melancholic prose, ?but it’s an extremely pessimistic representation of the difficult world we live in.

Yet, with that in mind, it’s worth a look for being so effective at delivering its perspective. Death Noodle Delivery is sympathetic??, but it has no answers for you. It may remind you that you?’re not alone in your struggles, but rarely have I found that sentiment to be helpful. Instead, we can only be like Jimmy and hope that by continuing to put one foot in front of the other, we’ll eventually get somewhere better. At least there are noodles to comfort us in the meantime.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

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Troglobytes Games has announced that the dystopian delivery simulator developed by Tiny Pixel and Stupidi Pixel, Death Noodle Delivery, will be released on PC on April 4th, 2024. Console versions wi??ll follow later.

This is the first I’ve heard of Death Noodle Delivery, but it seems to combine two things I very deeply love: noodles and Paperboy. You ride your hoverboard down the neon-soaked streets of dy??stopia, throwing cups of noodles at pe?ople nearby. Some of the scenes depict the delivery person riding down a highway on their hoverboard while people try to kill them, so high sodium levels aren’t the only dangers in this game.

Between the delivery and death scenes, the protagonist returns to their depressing apartment. It’s a bit more difficult to discern what goes on at the apartment, but the presser mentions that you deal with “the relationships in his apartment complex, where tech-obsessed neighbors, seedy characters, and AI malfunctions leave little room for boredom.�/p>

Whenever I’m very stressed out, I often have dreams involving noodles. I’m not making that up. The most recurring imagery in my dreams is noodles. I’m not sure what that imagery is supposed to mean, but I think it’s just my su?bconscious comfort eating.

I didn’t bring that up for any specific reason, so I’m just going to use it to segue into saying that I am very interested in Death Noodle Delivery.

Death Noodle Delivery i??s out on PC April 4th, 2024. Ports for Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch platforms will arrive som??etime after that.

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