During his tenure as the leading newsman of the 1980s, Atari's Paperboy faced many painful challenges: brawling drunks, swarms of bees, the literal Grim Reaper. But every day he answered the noble call of journalism, strapping his sidecar to his mighty BMX and braving the dangerous, rugged suburbs of Reaganite America.
I speak as a news editor. And Paperboy, a former newspaper deliveryman who broke his mind and body delivering obese Sunday editions to millionaire homes at the top of the valley, is my role model. Or maybe he would be if my role model wasn’t Steven Spielberg’s Freakazoid. But the Paperboy’s heyday is long gone, and the job of journalism has changed beyond recognition. People don’t read newspapers anymore; they just eat pizza. At least that’s the condensed analysis offered by Food Boy, which was released on Steam this week.
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Food Boy's name should be Pizza Boy, of course. I'm assuming he's not called Pizza Boy because either 1) another game is called Pizza Boy or 2) Pizza Boy is also the name of a Game Boy Advance emulator, and Food Boy cares enough about food without the chance of accidentally getting stabbed by Nintendo's lawyers. He lives in a world where people are so hungry for deep dish food that being deprived of it for even a few seconds drives them completely mad, causing them to gallop after Food Boy while cursing and groaning, and ram him so hard that they cause a nuclear explosion. My working thesis is that either Food Boy or his world is made of antimatter.
Luckily, Food Boy has weapons to use against these pie-eyed maniacs. His weapon: pizza. It turns out that the only way to fend off the people who are going crazy over the lack of pizza is to hit them with pizza, because Poison Was The Cure. Look, Food Boy didn't ask to be born into this hateful, contradictory universe. He just wants to ride his bike around shiny collectible CDs, jump off ramps, and listen to hip hop. He dreams of a better life for his children one day, when all the pizzas are saved and all pizza lovers are either fed or killed.
Food Boy's other trials and tribulations include noisy dogs, bouncing basketballs, ungracefully thrown boomerangs, and sudden turns in the road that reveal this deceptively slanted world as a 3D model—a polygonal concoction that would seem blasphemous to the god-fearing Paperboy, because Paperboy moves diagonally, after all, and so do chess bishops, and look, just keep going. But Food Boy's greatest enemies are the twerkers. They slither around the road, cracking their cheeks and bumping their butts into him in clumsy disrespect, not necessarily hindering Food Boy, but certainly taking his eye off the prize, reminding him of the GTA 6 trailer and making him pedal straight into a basketball.
These distractions might not be so egregious if the Food Boy weren't hampered by a terrible control scheme that feels like it was made for touchscreens. It's not enough to press a button like Paperboy once did – the pizza has to be flung out of Food Boy's hectic form like an elastic band by dragging the cursor back and releasing it. Time slows down in the process, but it's still difficult because Food Boy is lurking at the bottom of the screen. I suppose this makes sense, since there's always the risk of an explosive attack, but it also means there's not enough room to drag the cursor back, and in any case, if you aim at the pizza for too long, you'll explode too. It's all very mysterious to me.
Food Boy isn’t a great game, but it has a certain vibe. I wrote about it partly because I spent valuable time playing the Steam demo, and partly because I liked the idea of the Paperboy format applied to different neighbourhoods scattered across the space-time continuum. Can someone make one for the next 90s Yorkshire? Because I’ve got plenty of advice. I’m pretty sure I could flatten a twerker with a Sunday newspaper.