Disparity Games will be bringing its platformer about “bullying, emotional resilience and pizza-delivering ninjas,” appropriately called Ninja Pizza Girl, to PlayStation 4 in 2015. It has previously been confirmed for Wii U, Xbox One, Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS too.
It’s set in the not-too-distant future in which mega corporations run the world and, in the cities, skyscrapers are built on top of slums in order to save space. Due to this, the only way to deliver pizza efficiently is to employ poorly paid teenagers with ninja skills.
As the 16-year-old Gemma, it’s your job to deliver pizzas across the city for your father and his pizzeria business. But Gemma’s biggest worry isn’t the corporations, the exploitation of the poor, or upholding her family business – it’s other teenagers.
Most other teenagers work for the pizza mega corporations and wear ninja outfits. Gemma is an outsider to this culture as she isn’t a ninja pizza deliverer. So you don’t have to worry about Gemma’s health as you do her ability to cope with peer pressure and bullying.
“Hurting yourself in the game is annoying, but something that Gemma can deal with. Getting hurt in front of a bunch of your fellow ninjas, however, is a serious issue. The rival ninjas all stop to laugh at her. Shadows lengthen and colours drain from the world,” writes Jason Stark, co-founder of Disparity Games, on the PlayStation Blog.
On the other hand, if you perform well, running smoothly and nailing jumps, Gemma gets in the zone and the world becomes more colorful and vivid. It’s a game that combines old-school rhythm platforming with the real issues that people face every day.
Ninja Pizza Girl was successfully funded on Kickstarter earlier this year. You can find out more about it on its website.
