Pizza Express is an indie restaurant simulator available on Steam and various other PC gaming storefronts for an easily affordable price. If you’re anything like me, you’ll wishlist it and get lucky when it goes on sale for even cheaper. 🙂

Congratulations! You have been hired to work at a fast-paced pizza joint with a jokingly sarcastic coworker who might be a giraffe. She helps keep you in line as you make pizza pies and progress through the storyline. Your boss is Gastone, and he needs your help keeping the place open and successful. There are obstacles to overcome and marketing decisions to be made. Customizations to the menu and ingredients will add to the appeal and makes things fun and interesting in game play.

At first glance, the lo-fi design of the game stood out to me, deceiving me into thinking that this game might not hold my attention for too long. But by restaurant day 11, I realized I had been playing for way longer than I expected. It gets addicting. You can name your new pizzas anything you want to (which made me laugh), customize the prices, and purchase and use various ingredients to make them with. Orders come in and a timer starts … hurry up! Orders can pile up and impatient customers will walk out.

The main storyline is moved along by the enter key with some story-decisions to be made in between. There is an option to skip through story banter. Gameplay itself is accomplished by pizza making and is a click-and-drag format. Orders are timed and multiple orders are coming in. As an order is completed, it is struck out with a red line so you can focus on the next one (see above). Pizzas can be made out of order. So, in the example above, the Mega Bad could have been made before The Yuck. Holding the cursor/crosshair over the order name will remind you what ingredients are needed for each.

Items are customized within the menu system that will be explained via a tutorial. I’m not good at being patient and tend to skip through EVERYTHING I CAN on games. These tutorials are worth watching as they are quick and entertaining. Once you get the hang of it, you will enjoy changing out ingredients and coming up with new pizza-abominations and giving them awful names to serve up to your customers because they won’t care what it’s called or has on it. They just want their Yo Mamma pizza as fast as possible.

Besides the story mode, there is also a challenge mode with both arcade and endurance options. These play much like making pizzas do in the main story, but with stricter timing and more pressure added. Plus, you get to listen to some 8-bit-style techno jams while working.

Pizza Express is by Plug In Digital and Dear Villagers and is quite addicting. It’s lo-fi fun that will help kill some boredom without having to overthink anything while doing so. There is a save feature, but no joystick support–which works well for this game’s mechanics.

If you’re into games like Cook, Serve, Delicious! (Yes, I have all three and only go for gold, baby!) and Overcooked, I think you’ll enjoy this retro gem of a game!

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Veronica holds a B.B.A. in Computer Information Systems and also majored in Computer Science ages ago. She has gamed since she was 9 years old. This review is based on opinion and all photos of the game are used for reference, informational purposes, and belong to the author/developer of the game. There was no compensation for this review.