Tales From Off-Peak City Vol. 1
Cosmo D · 2020 · First-Person, Surreal, Adventure, Exploration, Atmospheric
PC
Overwhelmingly Positive99% · 525
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About Tales From Off-Peak City Vol. 1
Tales From Off-Peak City Vol. 1 is set in the same universe as both The Norwood Suite and Off-Peak, Cosmo D’s previous games.
It’s a hazy Sunday morning on the corner of July Avenue and Yam Street. Caetano Grosso, a former saxophone player and longtime pizza-maker, is just getting his pizza oven warmed up. Orders are trickling in, and he needs someone to help with the deliveries. You sense an opportunity, but unbeknownst to him, what you’re really after is his old saxophone, and you’re going to get it one way or another. Your pursuit will set off a chain of events across the neighborhood, taking you deep into the hidden worlds and private lives of the people living there.
Tales From Off-Peak City is a first-person adventure game series, all set on, around, and under a single street corner. Filled with memorable characters and the spaces they inhabit, the game provides an open-ended world full of secrets and hidden agendas. Building on the gameplay foundations of Off-Peak and The Norwood Suite, players will explore the streets and its surroundings, make pizzas, take photos, push buttons, open drawers they’re not supposed to, and lose themselves inside the atmospheric musical score that integrates itself directly into the game world.
Volume 1: Caetano’s Slice is the first game of many in the anthology of Tales. While each ‘Volume’ is its own self-contained story and experience, taken together, they build towards the larger over-arching narrative of what’s really going on at the corner of July Avenue and Yam Street and what role you ultimately play in its fate.
It’s a hazy Sunday morning on the corner of July Avenue and Yam Street. Caetano Grosso, a former saxophone player and longtime pizza-maker, is just getting his pizza oven warmed up. Orders are trickling in, and he needs someone to help with the deliveries. You sense an opportunity, but unbeknownst to him, what you’re really after is his old saxophone, and you’re going to get it one way or another. Your pursuit will set off a chain of events across the neighborhood, taking you deep into the hidden worlds and private lives of the people living there.
Tales From Off-Peak City is a first-person adventure game series, all set on, around, and under a single street corner. Filled with memorable characters and the spaces they inhabit, the game provides an open-ended world full of secrets and hidden agendas. Building on the gameplay foundations of Off-Peak and The Norwood Suite, players will explore the streets and its surroundings, make pizzas, take photos, push buttons, open drawers they’re not supposed to, and lose themselves inside the atmospheric musical score that integrates itself directly into the game world.
Volume 1: Caetano’s Slice is the first game of many in the anthology of Tales. While each ‘Volume’ is its own self-contained story and experience, taken together, they build towards the larger over-arching narrative of what’s really going on at the corner of July Avenue and Yam Street and what role you ultimately play in its fate.
What Steam players say
Recent verbatim reviews from Steam — separate from playze.io community reviews below.
✦ AI summary
Players praise this game's unique atmosphere, creative world-building, and memorable characters, with particular appreciation for Cosmo D's distinctive artistic vision and excellent soundtrack. While some find the gameplay mechanics basic—primarily walking, pizza-making, and delivery—the quirky, surreal setting and mysterious storytelling more than compensate, drawing players into exploring more of the developer's interconnected universe.
It's definitely an improvement over Cosmo D's previous games, and you can start to see the trajectory of where he's going. My main complaint with the older ones were that there isn't very much to the "game" component - I'm fine with walking simulators, but having so much of the (overly simplistic) story tied up in eavesdropping seems like a low-effort way of delivering narrative info. The music is definitely the standout here, as in the previous games - and it's cool to see the developer start to branch into some actual mechanics besides solely fetch quests with the pizza and photo activities. Somewhere along the way, I realized that these games really have no basis being compared to David Lynch's art, as some game reviewers do. Lynch's work is maddeningly complex, and at times disturbing banal, with significant messages that linger in your subconscious for years. Cosmo D's games are more like (as a friend put it) Meow Wolf's installations, full of neon-soaked distractions. They're not really games, but funhouses, with interesting environments to explore and set-pieces to discover. The thing is, you don't go to funhouses to experience deep art. You go because they're fun.
an incredible and unique experience as always from this dev! i'd suggest playing the norwood suite before starting tales from off-peak city vol. 1, it has a ton of references. really looking forward to an official vol. 2 eventually.
good
10/10 pizza delivery sim
Perfect. Relaxing, mysterious, reminding me of existentialism, dreams and post-modern jazz in a way more mature form than off-peak. I love Cosmo D.
Wonderfully imaginative and interesting.
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