Tales From Off Peak City Review Weirder Than Pineapple On Pizza

Title: Tales From Off-Peak City Vol. 1 Developer: Cosmo D Publisher: Cosmo D Studios LLC Genre: 3D Adventure Game Available On: Steam, Itch.io Release Date: May 15, 2020 Version Tested: PC

Tales From Off-Peak City is a game in the long line of surreal indie games. Games like Thirty Flights of Loving and Jazzpunk laid the groundwork for the comedic, bizarre game and Off-Peak effectively builds on the genre.

Surrealist Style

The medium of video games is particularly well suited to Surrealism and Tales From Off-Peak City is a great example of this disposition. The world of the game is bent in strange ways and connected in ways that don’t make logical sense. Everything about the world of Off-Peak City is built to unbalance the player. It is a rundown neighborhood seen through a fun-house mirror. The game goes so far as characterizing inanimate objects like buildings. The art style of the game plays into the structural weirdness with character designs that look and animate in odd ways sometimes. Off-Peak City also uses color in unexpected ways to help keep the player off balance. Buildings, clothing, and objects in the environment are all colored just differently enough from normal that they create an unsettling backdrop. The overall effect is a delightful but sometimes sinister world to play around in.

Another aspect of the game that plays into the surrealistic aesthetic is the music and sound effects work. The game’s score is mostly made up of downtempo atmospheric jazz tracks. This music works with the in-game sound effects to help encourage players to actually be playful and ignore progression in favor of exploration.

Meandering Gameplay In Off-Peak City

In terms of what players actually do in Off-Peak City a pizza making and delivery sim. After a brief introduction and tutorial players begin working at a pizza parlor. The job is fairly straightforward in general but odd in detail. The orders that come in, for example, will say things like “Consider the source” instead of “Pepperoni and olives.” Players also collect pizza toppings while exploring the neighborhood which varies between the usual olives and peppers to the more bizarre flamingo meat and synthetic brain matter. Once the orders have been parsed and the pizza has been baked it’s time to make the delivery. This is where the game really shines as each delivery takes the player to a new corner of the strange world of Off-Peak City and into contact with another set of weirdo residents. These sequences play out as short, or sometimes not so short, conversations about the characters that ordered the pizza and the pizza the player made for them.

The judgment of the pizza tends to be a rundown of the ingredients the player chose accompanied by a positive or negative impression from the character that made the order. These conversations also reveal choice bits of background about Off-Peak City that help fill in the plot of the game.

Straight Forward Storytelling

That story is where Off-Peak City loses a bit of steam. The set up for the narrative is that the player is working at the pizzeria undercover in an attempt to steal an item from the proprietor. There is also a sinister corporation operating in the neighborhood that temporarily disappears people only to return them with changed personalities. Ultimately the story is about giving up on dreams of youth and settling down and what that does to people. The game is not really positive on the idea of settling down, in fact, the game’s surreal aesthetic lends sinister energy to the forces in the game that oppose the player. The main problem with the story in Off-Peak City is that the game is trying to be a mystery story but there’s not really that much mystery to the plot. There are twists and turns to the narrative but the outcomes are a bit predictable.

This is largely due to the relatively small scope of the game compared to the story it wants to tell. For there to be a mystery about a plot there needs to be many potential characters and factions with different motives. A play-through of Off-Peak City can take less than thirty minutes. In a game of this length, there isn’t really time to make a mystery come to life so the whole narrative feels like it’s on rails. The story is a bit short as well, but that’s par for the course for an inexpensive, episodic game.

Film Photography in Off-Peak City

One of the best mechanics in Tales From Off-Peak City has nothing to do with anything else in the game. One of the first characters players encounter in the game is selling an old camera and throughout the game different types of film can be found lying around. This camera can be used to snap photos at basically any time. The interplay of focus, exposure, and the film used to take a photo track fairly closely to the way an actual film camera would and the environment on Off-Peak City encourage taking a lot of photos. Just wandering around the Bizzaro city and snapping photos is one of the most fun things to do in Off-Peak City. Doing this doesn’t actually do anything for the story of the game, though, which is slightly disappointing.

Final Verdict: Tales From Off-Peak City is a wonderfully surreal game about the anxiety that comes from settling down and giving up on the dreams of youth. While the game’s aesthetic is amazing, the moment-to-moment action is a bit simple and not cohesively integrated. A bizarre but fun little game.