Konami has its hands full right now. It has promising remakes of both Silent Hill 2 and Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater in the works, but those aren’t the publisher’s only upcoming games. In recent years, Konami has revitalized its publishing effort to include original titles from small studios (see this summer’s CYGNI: All Guns Blazing). Its two upcoming behemoths shouldn’t overshadow one of those smaller projects: Deliver at All Costs.
The debut title from Far Out Games is a chaotic ode to classic Grand Theft Auto games (particularly GTA 2), but with more slapstick humor. It takes place in an alternate 1950s America where farm boy Winston Green lands a job as a delivery man with a trust pickup truck. It all sounds easy-going enough, except for the fact that any and everything in the quiet town of St. Monique can be destroyed.
I demoed the first 90 minutes of Deliver At All Costs at a recent Konami preview event and walked away smiling. It’s already shaping up to be a uniquely entertaining vehicular comedy of errors. If it can keep escalating the creative gags I’ve seen already, Far Out Games could have a small-scale hit on its hands.
Special delivery
Deliver At All Costs is a top-down driving game where players need to make increasingly wacky deliveries across town in a beat-up truck. If that sounds a little familiar, that’s because this is a much bigger version of a small viral hit. Before forming its studio, a few of Far Out Games’ team members created a version of Deliver At All Costs as a student game. They released it on itch.io for free, where it earned the attention of PC Gamer. That press hit led to a conversation with Konami who greenlit an expanded version. While the original Deliver At All Costs (now listed as Delivery Man) was a quick arcade game, this one is a 10+ hour adventure with more narrative focus and hand-crafted missions.
My demo starts when Winston Green hears an old-timey radio ad for a company called We Deliver. They’re hiring a driver, so he heads to their offices only to discover that he heard an outdated ad. Still, the company gives him a chance and a pickup truck to try out the job. It’s no easy task though; Winston must complete totally absurd tasks that turn driving into a hilarious battle with physics.
In my first mission, I have to transport a box of fireworks in my truck bed. As soon as I put my foot on the gas, all hell breaks loose. Fireworks start shooting from the back as I drive and cars blow up in front of me. I need to swerve to avoid them, as well as stray fireworks that can damage my car. The mission immediately highlights the chaotic joy of Deliver At All Costs: Everything is destructible. I can smash through any building, which collapses into 100 pieces. When my car takes damage, watch as its front bumper slowly crumples. I eventually lose a wheel and start skidding across the pavement. I can even smash into pedestrians, sending their bodies rag-dolling across the screen. It’s a riot.
All of that would escalate throughout my demo. My next mission would fill my truck bed with watermelons that I needed to cart around town. I’d need to safely deliver 20 to my destination — but physics had a different plan. As I drive, the melons bounce around my truck bed and spill out if I swerve too recklessly. That’s not the only thing that can ruin my mission. Whenever I hit a pedestrian, there’s a chance they’ll get enraged and attack the truck. I need to make a careful but speedy escape when an angry citizen starts smacking my truck, inadvertently shaking watermelons out. It’s a comedically tense sequence, like a slapstick version of The Wages of Fear.
The appeal here is that St. Monique is an unpredictable sandbox that’s prone to emergent accidents. In one mission, I have to drive a live Marlin around town. It squirms in the back of my truck, sending my car jerking left and right unexpectedly. I need to keep it calm by driving through barrels of fish food or else it’ll make a break for it. I learn that the hard way when I drive too close to a river and the hungry fish flops into the water, forcing me to restart my mission. When I recall that outcome to the developers, they laugh in disbelief. Even they’re surprised by their own game.
Those are Deliver at All Costs’ best moments — ones that are more naturally funny than its hokey writing. There’s still some work to do on the presentation side before it launches. The build I played included some poor-quality voice acting that sounded suspiciously robotic. I get the sense that those might have been placeholder audio (or at least I hope), so it seems like there’s some polishing to come.
So long as the rough edges get smoothed out, Konami should have something unique on its hands. Deliver At All Costs is playfully nostalgic while still doing something that feels entirely inventive. It’s the kind of creative left turn that big publishers used to take more regularly, giving me hope that the industry is starting to see the value in smaller games again.
