Pizza Tower is unbelievably good.
I mean I really can’t believe it.
The whole time I was playing the game, I was like, this can’t be real. Where's the disappointment?
There’s always disappointment…
It's not that I think Tour de Pizza,
the small studio that made the game— doesn’t know what they’re doing.
It's just that, typically a retro-inspired indie platformer of this scope has some burnt crust.
Or the sauce is not quite distributed correctly —
— Some element doesn’t land.
But not Pizza Tower.
This game reaches for lots of things: Precision platforming, expressive hand-drawn animation,
heaps of game-changing power-ups, multiple playable characters, multi-stage boss battles,
even a sports level. And its reach never exceeds its grasp.
Pizza Tower firmly grips its ambitions confident hands and
drives them headfirst through a stack of bricks.
[HUGE MEME EXPLOSION]
Let me back up a bit.
Pizza Tower is a 2d platformer inspired by the long-dormant Wario Land series,
which was a quirky departure from Nintendo’s mainline Mario titles.
The goal of most Mario levels in this era was simply to reach the flag at the end, and in
most cases you could do this by sprinting to the right and reacting to obstacles as they appeared.
Wario Land’s levels were less linear— full of switchbacks,
gimmicks, hidden rooms, and navigation puzzles.
You could scroll TO THE LEFT!
And unlike Mario, he solved his problems with pure brute force.
270 pounds of thoroughbred Italian stallion.
[muffled tony soprano noises]
Wario had grapple attacks and a shoulder charge. He was also invincible (in some of the games).
Pizza Tower is a funhouse mirror reflection of Wario Land, with a Nicktoons-by-way-of-ms-paint
art treatment. Our not-Wario is Peppino Spaghetti, a quivering mass of anxiety
and anger on a mission to save his pizzeria from the evil that dwells in the titular Pizza Tower.
It feels very good to play as little Peppino. Molto Bene. His primary attack is a grapple
with multiple directional follow-ups, so he can chuck an enemy at another victim,
punt them skyward, or hit ‘em with a downright Zangiefian spinning piledriver. It’s a limited
moveset, but it’s snappy and intuitive, and I never got tired of watching these animations.
Pizza Tower’s movement system is also so good. Peppino can
accelerate into a dramatic sprint. He can clamber up sheer cliff faces,
wall jump, use a metroid-y shinespark to rocket upwards, and a bellyflop to crash back down.
But even as Peppino blazes through levels,
the game never feels like it’s on autopilot. Peppino’s movement system
is full of intentional idiosyncrasies that make it more expressive, and fun to master.
For example, let’s look at this wall. We want uppies.
If we’re already in a sprint,
we can simply keep holding sprint and do a quick hop and climb the wall.
If we don’t have enough space to get into a sprint, or you lost your momentum bumping
into a bad guy or a wall, well, then you can jump then attack the wall. You’ll stick for a second,
but if you don’t start sprinting right away, you’ll fall back off.
And if you’re feeling fancy, you can shinespark out of your sprint,
then cancel into a shoulder charge in midair.
You’ve got a big moveset, but your moves don’t chain into each other universally.
Peppino operates on a flow chart, learning to understand that was really fun. There’s
no catch-all “parkour” button, so navigating the levels requires constant, thoughtful input.
On top of the marinara smooth movement systems, most levels sprinkle in a gimmick.
Maybe it’s a totally different player character like Gustavo and Brick,
who have their own set of movement systems.
Maybe it’s portals.
...Maybe it’s a gun.
[power drunk pizza chef racks a shell]
I'm not gonna spoil them all,
because they are consistently delightful and funny, and that kind of blows my mind.
Like back in the golden olden days of 90’s platformers,
gimmick levels could be pretty good… or never ending nightmares.
And, honestly, the good ones are kind of better in your memory than they were in execution.
But in Pizza Tower, every gimmick feels fully baked. They're so good.
And we know this is because Tour De Pizza
had the restraint to leave stuff on the pizza cutting room floor.
Test builds of the game for Patreon backers have shown off extra playable characters,
transformations, and levels that aren’t in the full release, and honestly,
I think it’s cool that they held back on cramming them in before they were ready.
So, no matter what a level’s wrinkle is, the objective is to make it to the end,
knock out a pillar, and then get out of there before the whole stage collapses.
The escape sequences might be my favorite part...
Nnno. My favorite part is this pineapple.
I love the way he walks. I love his sunglasses. I love that he's down to just hang.
—But the escape sequences! Each one of them sends you scrambling back to the
start of the stage, testing your memory of the level’s layout and your mastery
of whatever level-specific gimmick they've given you.
Notably, these sequences are one of the only parts
of Pizza Tower that can result in a fail state, and I think that’s really
cool because it illustrates the game’s ingenious approach to game difficulty.
Like the long-dead pizza hut lunch buffet,
it's entirely self-serve. It’s as hardcore as you want it to be.
Peppino has inherited Wario’s invincibility,
so bumping into enemies only stuns him and hurts his combo meter (which is a thing he has).
Collectibles and secret areas can be tricky to track down, but they are mostly optional.
And even those frantic escape sequences give you a pretty generous countdown.
So, if you’re not a massocore platforming weirdo, you can bumble and scramble through
the levels and have a lovely time. BUT THEN, if you decide you’re ready to get a little crazy,
you can push harder, and the game has all sorts of fun toppings and built-in challenges to test you.
Go for a hitless run of that boss fight where you barely scraped by.
And if you’re feeling REALLY REALLY freaky,
you can try making it all the way through a level without breaking your combo meter,
landing a high score, and then taking a full second lap of your escape.
We call that— a P-Rank (for Pizza)
I feel silly using the word “elegant” in relation to a game where a frenzied
cartoon Italian uses a corpse as a skateboard—
but Pizza Tower does indeed have an elegant-ass approach to game difficulty.
It’s so good!!!
Pizza Tower may be inspired by platformers of yore, but it’s not just some nostalgic fluff.
It has tuned, evolved, and damn near perfected this specific niche of platforming.
It’s the rare homage that's actually better than the things that inspired it,
and I think you should give it a try.
AND I FORGOT TO TELL YOU ABOUT THE SOUNDTRA-[HYPERACTIVE PIZZABEAT EXPLODES]