Volume One of Tales From Off-Peak City is an escalating procession of existential crises staged through instances of gentrification, corporatism, and pizza delivery. It's a kitschy nightmare laundered through eccentric characters and their bizarre conditions and the product is a surreal but eloquent presentation on preventable social decay. A single city block and a couple of hours is all Tales From Off-Peak City needs to tell a grotesque, distinctive story.
It’s time for my first pizza delivery. I climb the stairs of the apartment building and enter the delivery address to see a well-dressed man sitting on a couch. Next to him is an infant in a crib with an identical version of his face, complete with beard and sunglasses. In his kitchen is a giant sign that says ASPARAGUS and a poster of an onion that is also a tree. He has arranged the books on his bookshelf by color and not by title or author. I present him with the pizza I made, a collection of fifty mushrooms and some splotches of tomato sauce with one slice of cheese. He compliments it and then he consumes it. After he passes out in a bathtub I will leave through his back door and take a long playground slide down to a nearby alley. Volume One of Tales From Off-Peak City presents all of this as normal.
I expect Tales From Off-Peak City to unfold in one of three ways. The first (and most cynical) is to assume it’s a collection of humorously assembled assets cobbled together in the spirit of randomness and spontaneity. The second is to reason it will be like the waiting room from Beetlejuice and test the player with preposterous but relatable instances of collective misery. The third is to label it as a modern take on LSD: Dream Emulator and assign Lynchian dream logic as the key to unlocking every scenario. I am wrong on all three of these guesses.
Tales From Off-Peak City is closer to Gummo, a film that delighted in taping a piece of bacon to a bathroom wall. It is weird all the time, but its strangeness isn’t arbitrary or without a specific direction. Whereas Gummo depicted poverty and tragedy through the eyes of a blighted Ohio town, Tales From Off-Peak City uses a city block and a pizza delivery service as a lens to examine a wider swath of its doomed slice of culture. Tech Giants have monetized existentialism and the local populace can’t get out of its way. Everyone is affected and everyone suffers and the only means of comfort—shared by everyone—is a delicious pizza. Tales From Off-Peak City, in a brisk couple of hours, disarms the player with peculiarity only to confront them with reality. Despite its outlandish trappings, its objectives are not oblique.
When Tales From Off-Peak City opens, the player is told to seek employment from Caetano Grosso at his pizza restaurant. Your mission, provided by the pair of weirdoes that boated you in, is to steal Caetano’s prized saxophone. Tales From Off-Peak City takes place at the intersection of July Avenue and Yam Street. Pizza orders come in, the player takes them out. Plot-related clues and background information unfold along the way. Time is divided between chatting up the local populace and finding ways to get behind locked doors. And you seem to have as much time as you need.
Strolling down July and Yam yields some strange sights. Building facades are often faces and some of those faces appear sentient. Every window in one house if full of siamese cats. There’s a giant paper mache dog peering over a fence with electric blue eyes. Blue industrial waste spilling out into the streets is no big deal. People are swimming with pool noodles in the canals. The gummy worms I collected move when I use them as pizza toppings. Tales From Off-Peak City does not run short on ways to direct the player into questioning reality, and it works because the residents no-sell every bewildering aspect of that reality. All of this is normal, but should all of this be normal?
There’s a certain efficiency at play with Tales From Off-Peak City’s basic operation. The player’s primary action is walking around and listening to conversations. Some items can be collected and used to solve minor puzzles on other parts of the city block. The local populace seems happy to talk to you despite recognizing you as an outsider. While Tales From Off-Peak City plays closer to a 90’s adventure game than a modern walking simulator, its primary interest is telling a story and all of its actions foster this desire. Everything here has a point, and the player and their avatar are both detectives trying to figure it all out.
While it’s hard to shake Tales From Off-Peak City out of its rhythm, there is plenty of room for improvisation. There are some are vague directions for pizza orders, but the reality is that you can throw whatever you want on there and the customer will be fairly happy with it. They’ll comment on almost every choice you made, from the overflowing amount of grey brain batter to the lake of tomato sauce. Extra ingredients beyond the basics at the pizza shop, such as delicious flamingo meat, can be collected from around the block. All of this adds up to a minor sense of agency and makes the player feel like they’re a participating member of this world.
There are major facets of Tales From Off-Peak City that I was not equipped to understand. The first is its fascination with photography, as the player can collect different types of film and (after buying a camera) use that film to shoot pictures all over the block. This seems like a fun diversion and a unique way to capture the world. Is it something more? I don’t know! Maybe!
The second is Tales From Off-Peak City’s relationship with music. A lot of residents have a boom box nearby and music, both diegetic and not, is a constant companion. Dialogue is often a series of samples injected at a rapid pace in place of spoken words. The music is created by Cosmo D (Greg Heffernan), and its lavish improvisation as the player shifts to different venues and scenarios could only be performed through jazz, a genre a music I know almost nothing about. This is personally embarrassing, obviously, but I am reluctant to talk about jazz or how it relates to Tales From Off-Peak City because I will have no idea what I am talking about.
Even with this level of cultural ignorance (along with inexperience with Cosmo D’s other two games, Off-Peak and The Norwood Suite) I found plenty to appreciate in Tales From Off-Peak City. I knew it was going to be weird but I didn’t know it would be so well equipped at creating different dimensions of social commentary and likening its weird world to an ordinary city street. I improvised my pizzas while Tales From Off-Peak City’s narrative stayed on its pace, and it sure felt like we built something unique in the end.
At the end, though, I felt I had been rushed into the conclusion and left a lot of tasty content on the table. There were pizza orders I never completed an items at the knickknack shop I could never afford. So, I replayed Tales From Off-Peak City from its start. And I found an identical game, other than some dialogue changes based on my different pizza selections. I think these orders aren’t meant to be completed and these items are not intended to be bought. This doesn’t really affect what value I found in playing Tales From Off-Peak City the first time (it’s also possible I just wasn’t clever enough to complete these actions), but it’s a bit confusing. As the first installment in Tales From Off-Peak City, perhaps it’s material left waiting for future volumes.
Volume One of Tales From Off-Peak City is an escalating procession of existential crises staged through instances of gentrification, corporatism, and pizza delivery. It’s a kitschy nightmare laundered through eccentric characters and their bizarre conditions and the product is a surreal but eloquent presentation on preventable social decay. A single city block and a couple of hours is all Tales From Off-Peak City needs to tell a grotesque, distinctive story.
