Ninja Pizza Girl

I went into this one expecting a lightweight gimmick wrapped in a quirky title, and walked out quietly moved by it. Ninja Pizza Girl is a rooftop-running platformer from Disparity Games, a small Australian family studio whose daughters' real experiences with bullying sit at the foundation of the whole thing. That biographical weight is palpable from the first level, and it stops the game from feeling like an awareness-campaign checkbox. The core loop puts you in Gemma's shoes as she sprints, slides, wall-jumps, and rolls across a dystopian city's skyline, racing a timer to deliver her father's pizza before it goes cold. The movement reads something like a side-scrolling Mirror's Edge - momentum is the language, and breaking it costs you. Landing a long drop cleanly, chaining a wall-jump into a slide under a pipe, recovering with a roll rather than a stumble: these moments produce a small, satisfying music swell in the soundtrack (composed by Max Maars) that rewards you for maintaining flow. Lose that flow, and the music deflates along with the colour palette. That is not a metaphor - it literally happens on screen. The self-esteem system replaces a conventional health bar entirely. Rival MegaCorp ninjas do not deal hit points; they shove Gemma over, throw garbage at her, and laugh. Her emotional state drains. The world desaturates. If her morale collapses fully, she slumps to the floor and you have to mash a button to get her back up. It is mechanically simple, but the decision to make resilience the survival mechanic rather than hit points is a genuinely thoughtful one. The game's 20-odd levels also offer branching paths, a speedrun mode that strips out story moments, global leaderboards, and collectibles - recycling symbols that act as currency for new outfits and QR codes that unlock gameplay modifiers like double jump or big head mode. Completionists will need multiple passes at each stage; a single-run completion of the story takes around two to three hours. The friction points are real and worth naming. Enemy placement occasionally disrupts your flow through no fault of your own - rival ninjas hidden in the background ambush you at the worst moments. The collectibles sit in tension with the speed-run instinct, since grabbing them often means stopping when the game clearly wants you moving. Some of the dialogue between Gemma and the customers who open the door is earnest to a fault, and critics were divided on whether the writing lands or oversells its message. The controls, particularly on keyboard, can feel slightly unresponsive for a game that asks for precision. These are genuine rough edges on a game that is otherwise trying something unusual. What lingers, though, is the craft behind the intention. The dystopian city art - neon-lit corporate towers looming over colour-drained slums - gives the world a lived-in texture that most small indie budgets cannot pull off. The soundtrack shifts dynamically as you build or lose momentum, quietly teaching you to care about Gemma's mental state through sound before the story asks you to. It is a short game that knows when to end, and that restraint is itself a form of respect for the player. If you have a teenager in your life who is going through it, or if you simply want an indie that earns its emotional register rather than just claiming it, Ninja Pizza Girl is worth the time it asks from you.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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