The Gig Economy Gets Fun: Deliver at All Costs

All due credit to the courier community that—by hook or by crook,or scooter, moped, or e-bike—keeps us stocked with essentials and delicious foodstuffs. But another generation had it even tougher… Well, they did in Deliver at All Costs, a new game from Gothenburg, Sweden-based studio Far Out Games .

It’s 1959 and hapless delivery guy Winston Green has a tight schedule and a full load of mayhem. Dogged by a mysterious past, he lands a spot with the only company that’s hiring: ‘We Deliver, Co’. In this world, the payload always gets through—no matter what. And that’s saying something when Winston reverses into and destroys a building,  picks up a thrashing marlin, grabs a bunch of balloons with enough gas in them to lift the truck off the ground, or is threatened by a meteor strike. This is not your average door dash. Deliver at All Costs is a highly destructible delight, and Far Out Games CEO Lars Olsson crashed through the walls of Intel Gaming Access to drop the latest about this madcap take on customer service.

“The studio was founded in the fall of 2021,” Olsson tells us, “when Deliver at All Costs, then a school project, gained some first attention, which encouraged us to make the leap and start the studio. The studio won pitch of the year at the Sweden Game Conference 2021, and later signed with publisher Konami in the spring of 2023. We are now nearing completion of our first production with the game Deliver at All Costs.” And nearing is right—the release is barreling toward us faster than a “30 minutes or it’s free” pizza: Mark your calendar for May 22, 2025.

Deliver at All Cost is drenched in retro-accented California/Miami style replete with scattered surfboards, vintage automobiles, and giant plastic flamingos. “The game adheres to a camera perspective and style that is reminiscent of old-school games Olsson tells us. “The game also draws heavy inspiration from 1950s Americana, and features an immersive atmosphere of environments, music, and humor relevant to the era. Above all, what players will experience is the totally destructible world, where actions have consequences, and buildings will crumble with physics as players crash into them with the player vehicle.”

Reversing into a solid building only to see it fall into dust is undeniably satisfying, but this isn’t just a demolition derby. “The missions feature different types of crazy things that the player will have to deliver to the designated recipient, no matter the cost,” Olsson explains. “Each mission will add new mechanics, and constantly surprise the player when it comes to the level of lunacy. Action, destruction, humour and folly… Deliver at All Costs will take the player on a ride where they will be absolutely thrilled to see what comes around the next corner, so to speak. As a developer, I often lose track of time while testing the game, completely forget what I was supposed to be working on—and somehow end up ‘accidentally’ leveling the entire city instead.” Gamers, don’t worry; as great an endorsement as this is, Far Out Games was able to pull their CEO back from the brink to get the game ready. 

The passion behind this level of attention in part stems from Olsson’s background as an architect. “I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the work of building the world,” Olsson admits. His team also draws on inspiration outside of the gaming world. “Far Out Games has a team of about 14 people. Our solid drive and previous experience from the architecture and film industries sets us apart from other developers and gives us a unique perspective. The company is a young and small game studio where most people on the team are involved in a variety of aspects of game development, rather than being specialized in narrow disciplines.”

The cinematic influence is clear not only in the authentic, movie-like feel of the setting, but the game’s narrative structure which centers our troubled Everyman, Winston. “The game is actually very fleshed out story-wise,” Olsson agrees. “The narrative is divided into three main acts, each of which will take the player further and further down the spiral of insanity that is Winston Green’s life. I think one of the things that will surprise people is that the world is actually very large, and has very little repetitiveness. We’ve spent a huge amount of time modeling and setting up each building in the world for destruction to make everything as juicy and custom-made as possible.”

Obviously, tearing stuff down throws up some challenges. “The challenge of accomplishing excellent performance, in a game where each asset can be composed of hundreds of loose parts that can be destroyed, has been one of the greater challenges we’ve been faced with,” Olsson says. “This has been something we’ve been forced to solve by implementing a multitude of different optimizations to achieve. The challenge of level designing a world where everything is destructible has also been a frequent topic of conversation. The implications of this of course being that the player can choose to take short cuts through buildings whenever they want.” 

Whenever they want? We obviously had to know if performance made a difference. “Performance has been an important topic throughout the whole production,” Olsson says. “Our heavy reliance on physics systems to achieve the massive amount of destruction that we have puts a lot of stress on the CPU, so naturally most of our optimization efforts have been directed there. It has definitely been one of the biggest challenges of this project. We landed quite early on a more stylized art style that we really like, which allowed us to steer clear of being forced to use the latest and greatest in rendering tech. This means we can have very good GPU performance as well. Because of our optimization efforts, players should expect the game to run well on any reasonably modern PC without needing a top of the line graphics card.”

That’s good news for gamers looking for something that arrives hot,fresh, and immediately playable. So go ahead, place your order for Deliver at All Costs today. 

Pre-purchase Deliver at All Costs on Steam