The Pizza Delivery Boy Who Saved the World is the best visual novel that has Pizza, Delivery, a boy, saving the world, and, most importantly, The.

In the market of visual novels where majority go for an Anime art style that is just so cool and appealing (don't get me wrong, I myself do enjoy the cute kind of aesthetic), The Pizza Delivery Boy Who Saved the World opts for a photorealistic approach, presenting real world photographs for backgrounds, real life people, and of course, realistic pizza ("Pizza so realistic you'll eat your computer" is one of the key features). The visuals presented make for a more grounded kind of read, maybe even relatable to some. Though it does include an element of time travel, which is far from grounded. Anyway, the visuals are interesting, and I do like them overall. Some of the backgrounds look great, and the actors have a variety of poses and emotions, so they aren't boring to look at. The music selection, even though it's licensed and not originally composed, is picked well and I do like some of the tracks quite a bit.

Of course, the visual novel is all (or almost all) about writing, and I did find it enjoyable, with some good cheesy humor in it. The time travel aspect may seem weird, but I found some of the writing to be absurd outside of that, so I don't really mind. I do think the antagonistic group that tried to destroy the internet and rule the world could've been fleshed out a bit more, and shown to be more of a threat, but again, I think the writing is absurd enough in a B-Movie sorta deal that it's not too big of an issue.

However, there are legitimate criticisms to be had. For some reason, the game lacks many basic features found in many visual novels, such as a log to review dialogue that you may have accidently skipped, a fast forward button and any ability to see the key bindings. To be fair, I haven't really seen a Ren'Py visual novel that had an ability to rebind keys or view the defaults, but at least those that I did had the appropriate buttons on the hud for auto, fast forward, log and so on. Actually, the game does have a fast forward, but for some reason it's in the options menu (in this game it's called "Toppings"), not during gameplay, like in other VNs. Also, after playing Cat President - ~A More Purrfect Union~, one of the dev's previous visual novels, they removed the ability to disable HUD with the mouse wheel click, which is baffling. It does have a "Cheese Level" in the options menu, which is always at MAXIMUM and the screen shakes when you try to change it. Amazing.

Overall though, it's a nice slice of reading pizza for an hour or two, with good comedy and unique visuals. If you want to take a break from those cringy/generic anime romance visual novels, this game may prove a nice change of pace, and it's not too pricy, especially on sale on Steam.

By the way, I see the platform options for PS5 and Xbox Series, did this game get native ports or is it backwards compatibility? I'm curious.

At first brush this definitely looks like shovelware, but when I was scrolling through the Switch eShop and happened to stumble upon it, I really thought it had the chance to be some sort of ironic masterpiece, and determined to play it at some point. Having finally played it some months later, I realize I set my expectations too high.

Now, to be fair, I do think that ironic masterpiece is what they were going for here, there are a lot of really wacky ideas that make me confident in saying that they didn't set out to make a B-tier shovelware title, but most of these ideas don't land well because the dialouge is pretty stiff.

I am still glad I tried it—I like the usage of real photographs for the characters and backgrounds, and I think it's worth trying out super obscure stuff once in a while just to see what you get—but it didn't really pay off.

Also all of the pizza looked terrible.