Video Game / No Delivery

At least you didn't end up like the last guy.

No Delivery is a horror-themed RPG with Roguelike elements created by oates with RPG Maker MV, a sequel to their earlier game One Night at the Steeze. The player is put in the shoes of various employees at the Stezzoni pizza parlor, spending the night shift investigating the place's eerie environs and taking Wrong Turns which lead them to tangle with the restaurant's more "exotic" denizens.

In Roguelike fashion, being defeated in combat results Permadeath. Luckily, another employee will be ready to take their place and receive all the items and money they have gathered so far (minus a severance fee).

The game was originally released on itch.io, and was added to Steam on June 11, 2023. One Night at the Steeze can be found here. There's also a very short, secret prequel game called We Deliver that sheds some light on the backstory; it can be found by poking around on the game's website and unlocked via a code found in No Delivery. A Spiritual Successor called Sorry, We're Open was released on Steam in February of 2023.

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The establishment beckons.

• Action Bomb: The Balloons will explode dealing moderate damage when you pop them. The Fleshy Mound are an inversion - destroying them will damage the rest of the enemy party instead.
• Ambiguous Ending: All but one of the endings leave the fate of your player character unconfirmed, and refuse to elaborate on what happens afterward except through strange monologues.
• Amplified Animal Aptitude: The Mascot employee is a dog in a cap who still manages to fight and explore as well as human employees. Like the latter, they don't talk on account of being a Heroic Mime.
• Arbitrary Gun Power: Security Guards and the Senior Staff have handguns. Firing them in single shots is a pretty inaccurate attack that deals middling damage, while the unlockable Unload skill strikes three times with reliable power and accuracy. Both skills consume Ammunition, which is very limited in the early game and rather expensive in the latter part.
• Arc Words: "The establishment beckons."
• Big Bad: One Night at the Steeze and the Termination ending implies that the Manager is this.
• Body Horror: Every enemy that isn't an Animate Inanimate Object has this in spades.
• Body of Bodies: The Custodial Consequence is a giant writhing trash bag through which the outlines of several bodies can be seen.
• Bragging Rights Reward: You unlock the Manager as a reward for finishing all five endings. She has the best stats and the Pink Slip skill, but by then you'll hardly have an use for that.
• Brown Note: Playing the Birthday Incident video cassette in the room where the Senior Staff is located (which is the only way you can watch it) will kill her.
• Capitalism Is Bad: Much of the game's horror (and Black Comedy) stems from the egregious abuse of underpaid employees by a nebulous but apparently all-seeing management that kills them if they learn too much. The creator even calls it "an rpg about the lesser evils of capitalism".
• Cast from Hit Points: Every skill that doesn't consume items is this.
• Cats Are Magic: There's a giant talking cat whose soul can be used in a necromantic ritual. The secret prelude "We Deliver" indicates that everything started when a similar cat's soul was used by the future Manager to give life to the animatronics. It's notable that her last words to The Kid back in One Night at the Steeze were advising him to "do himself a favor" and not kill any cats. The fact that this one in particular can talk is noted as being unique.
• Darker and Edgier: No Delivery is this, in comparison to One Night at the Steeze. The facility looks grittier, the enemy design is less cartoony and more unsettling, there's more blood and gore, the restaurant burning down is no longer entirely offscreen, and there are hints that The Kid didn't/doesn't/will not get away as unscathed as we saw before.
• Defeat Means Friendship: Two of your regular party members (the Drowned Waiter and Rustled Chef) may be fought before unlocking them as allies. In the Birthday Entity's case, this is mandatory (and the fight even ends with the message "The entity has deemed you worthy").
• Deliberate VHS Quality: The end-of-game cutscenes and Game Over screens, as well as the Wrong Turn triggered by playing the dubious VHS in the break room.
• Doomed Predecessor: You start the game playing in the Alleys Wrong Turn as a Delivery Guy who cannot attack, can't turn back, and has no skills, forcing him to escape every encounter. Even if he somehow makes it to the end of the stroll (unlikely, since he will die in one or two hits and is in the hardest variation of the Alleys), he will encounter the Custodial Consequence and be helpless to do anything until he is killed.
• Early Game Hell: With few to no items and no party members, the first strolls through a Wrong Turn are bound to cost players a few employees.
• Eldritch Location: The Wrong Turns, places where the layout of the pizzeria breaks down, and logic… isn't. They vary in length, size, and layout, and are filled with all manner of randomly-generated dangers, like Arcade Games that come to life to kill you.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": Your character is only known by their job title: Waitress, Mascot, Security Guard, Attendant…
• Foul Ball Pit: The Playground area of the game takes place in the labyrinthine ballpit of a Suck E. Cheese's. Like the rest of the restaurant, it's not only dirty, dingy, and poorly lit, but is infested with monsters. At the furthest part of the ballpit you discover human remains- the game leaves it ambiguous whether they're of an adult employee or of a child, and whether their death was caused by the supernatural dangers of the restaurant or just the management's extreme negligence.
• Gainax Ending: All of the endings other than the Certificate of Termination one take quite a bit of decoding and guesswork to make any sense of. Comparing them to the story and ending of One Night at the Steeze can help answer some questions, but also only raises others…
• Game-Over Man: The Collector is what takes the severance fees when a character is defeated. And while he'll defer payment if you haven't progressed far enough, he takes it poorly if you can't pay up after a certain point. He suffers from Lowered Monster Difficulty as the boss of the Backstage Wrong Turn, after which the severance fee is abolished. But if you thought that was the end, you've got another thing coming.
• Guest-Star Party Member: The Kid, Senior Staff, and Showtime Puppet make useful allies, but are only available for specific boss fights.
• He Knows Too Much: The Termination ending.
• Heroic Mime: None of the playable characters talk, with the exception of the Manager (who stops talking when you're controlling her).
  • Averted during the day shift, where some options are dialogue-based.
• Hyperactive Metabolism: All healing items are food, the staple one being literally named "Food" and represented by a slice of pizza in the menus. Food also tends to produce other useful items, like trash and plates you implement in combat.
• Luck Stat: An employee's Fear level makes it more likely for negative events to happen the higher it is, for instance Mimics coming out of gift boxes instead of items.
• Monster Clown: You can see several outside the boundaries of certain rooms. Subverted, as these turn out to be strange statuettes that you can exchange for an important item. The real clown you have to look out for is the Birthday Entity.
• Non-Malicious Monster: The Pizzeria's inhabitants are weird, but not all of them are hostile. The… things… in the trash cans that trade you money for garbage, whatever's lurking in the dumpster in the alley, the Showtime Puppet, and the Collector (initially, at least) are all quite affable and will chat with you.
  • The Showtime Puppet in particular is actually a giant Mimic's tongue, but he badly wants to be free of the rest of his "body." You can help him cut himself loose.
  • You can even have a chat with one of the Body Bag enemies encountered in the Alleys Wrong Turn, lying in the storeroom behind the Bathrooms; he'll strike up a conversation with you, politely asking you not to cut him loose, since he isn't done "hardening" yet.
• No OSHA Compliance: The restaurant is filthy, littered with safety hazards, and downright deadly on account of being an Eldritch Location. Employees die all the time and are immediately replaced without much apparent investigation or outcry.
• Nothing Is Scarier: You never quite figure out what the human-looking abominations actually are or look like. You even find one mid-transformation while becoming a Bodybag, but being wrapped in, well, a bodybag, you can't discern any details.
• Never Mess with Granny: The Senior Staff. She's an aged, wheelchair-bound woman who is armed with a pistol and knows how to use it.
• Police Are Useless: It's possible for them to be called in if you screw up a certain way during the day shift. All that results in is a lot more Bodybags in the Alleys. And then there's how the investigations of past events have gone…
• Omega Ending: Getting the Certificates of Death, Birth, Survival, Necromancy, and Termination unlocks the last Certificate and the Museum, as well as a new player character.
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog: The Termination ending, which takes a fair amount of effort to reach, ends with you finding the Security room and being instantly shot for poking around too much.
• Shout-Out:
  • Predictably, quite a few to the Five Nights at Freddy's series:
    • You fight Endoskeletons in the Backstage. One of their skills, Springlock, calls back to the springlock suits from FNAF.
    • The are posters with pixelated versions of Freddy, Chica, Foxy and Bonnie put up in various locations of the game.
    • The phone call you get at the beginning of your first night starts of with the Phone Guy's trademark "Hello? Hello, hello?"
    • In a possible shout-out to Five Nights at Fuckboy's, one of the enemies you can fight in the endgame is the security cameras.
  • The Show Puppet is a dead ringer for Elmo. In the Museum, the authors even disclaim "any resemblance to other similarly-colored puppets" as anything but a coincidence.
  • One of the TV dramas you can watch basically tells the story of the prologue of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain in text form.
  • One of the Arcade Games in the Arcade Wrong Turn is a clear shout-out to Castlevania, involving a vampiric monster named Nosferatu who can only be stopped by one bloodline.
• Status Effects: Nausea (Poison), Stun, Marked, and Silence.
• Surreal Horror: There are spatially distorted alleyways filled with hostile trashbags, arcade cabinets that became sentient due to all the player data logged, ghostly waiters — the establishment is weird, nonsensical, and made more eerie by its hostility.
• Title Drop: The epilogue text after the credits of the Certificate of Necromancy ending.
  THE RELINQUISHED SOULS ARE FREE FROM THEIR BONDAGE
  THE ESTABLISHMENT NOW MAKES FOR A POOR VESSEL
  ITS NEIGHBORHOOD AND COMMUNITY POISONED IN ITS STAGNATION
  AND THERE IS
  NO DELIVERY
• Toilet Humor: Most of the skills that cause the Nausea status are related to feces or farts. There's also a sequence where you stick your hand down a toilet to get a key.
  It's probably brown from the rust.
• Token Evil Teammate: The Drowned Waiter, Birthday Entity and Rustled Chef become your party members once you unlock them. They are every bit as creepy as the rest of the restaurant's occupants, but at least they fight on your side. Unless you choose to feed the entity in the Survival ending, in which case they attack you.
• Token Good Teammate: The Showtime Puppet is the only non-human character that's completely friendly.
• Took a Level in Badass: The Manager. In One Night at the Steeze, she was only identified as an Employee, and while she was the Final Boss with dark magical powers and might have killed the previous Manager, her main attack was a Mana Drain and she could be beaten at level 2. In this game, she's an overpowered Secret Character with an attack that hits everything for the damage cap.
• Violation of Common Sense: To obtain the Certificate of Necromancy, you must, without any prodding whatsoever, climb inside a visibly lit furnace. This lets you face the Final Boss of this route.
• Was Once a Man: Pretty-much everyone, in one way or another. Most of the enemies in the kitchen and alleyway seem to be employees that have been corrupted or consumed, and you can even find versions of them in mid-transformation. The ball pit monster, in its major aspect, also seems to have a human skull. The Drowned Waiter and Rustled Chef are explicitly the ghosts of employees who died on the establishment. One Night at the Steeze further implies that all the animated puppets and other Animate Inanimate Object enemies are the result of transposing souls, including those of children and employees, into things lying around the establishment. Not to mention, the Final Bosses of both the Certificate of Necromancy and Certificate of Death endings are both more-or-less stated to have once been The Kid himself, and the de-facto Final Boss of the Certificate of Termination ending is the sole surviving victim of some kind of attack on the establishment's employees in the past. What exactly the deal with the Collector, the Birthday Entity, and the Mimic(s) is remains anyone's guess, though.
• Workplace Horror: The first game takes place in a pizza parlor, while the sequel in a supermarket.
• Zero-Effort Boss: The Kid and Helpless Souls that appear once you defeat the Phylactery will take no actions, making the fight impossible to lose by that point.

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