Platform(s): PC
Genre: 2D platformer channeling Wario Land series, but weirder

Chef Peppino Spaghetti is a guy struggling to get his pizza shop in order, when all of a sudden some giant tower owned by an entity named Pizza Face looms over the store. The latter wants to destroy the shop with a giant laser machine, so off Peppino goes to deal with the problem with his friend Gustavo.

And off you go, experiencing one of this year’s most esoteric and trippy-looking 2D indie platformers that has both style(?) and substance.

Special Delivery

The premise of Pizza Tower is simple: climb up the titular building as fat-but-agile-and-powerful Peppino through many levels, collecting toppings and getting to the end of the stage. Once there, destroy the gray block with the foreboding angry face, and then escape through new traps and obstacles, racing for your life before time runs out. All this while the game bombards you with its interesting MS Paint-esque art style that’s wholly animated like a traditional Disney film; it’s buttery smooth and gorgeous to look at in motion, right down to the weird alien spaceship interiors to the simple-yet-nauseating sewer levels with excrements.

Rinse and repeat through different levels with their own themes and platforming gimmicks, with most of them giving you power-ups for Peppino ranging from being flame-powered to wearing knight armour with thrusting fortitude. And just like classic platformers, there are a ton to collect from special stage items to secrets via eyeball teleporters that bring you to another dimension. Don’t ask; just go with the flow.

Peppino can’t die, but he does lose points if he gets hit too often, with each stage judging you with a rank based on your collection, your speed, and the number of times you get hurt. He only gets hit points in boss fights, where it becomes the traditional learn-patterns-and-fight-them showdowns. They’re all fun and encourage you to do better and get a higher score, with my personal favourite fight being the one against the Yo Noid pizza commercial gremlin knock-off to the final boss fight that rivals that of any Devil May Cry endgame setpiece.

If this all sounds similar to the Wario Land series, that’s because the developers are hugely inspired by the Game Boy and Game Boy Advance entries from Nintendo. Only now it’s a game tailor-made for 2023, with its 19 stages showing off the creativity and know-how of how to make fun platforming stages with momentum-based gameplay and level-based puzzles and obstacles to overcome. It’s also accompanied by spot-on controls. You run, you jump, you build momentum to do powerful block-breaking shoulder charges, you can even launch yourself upwards and run up walls.

You can file Pizza Tower’s Peppino as one of this generation’s most well-controlled characters in 2D gaming history. The game just feels damn good to play once you’re done with the tutorial, with each level slowly teaching you the ropes, the gimmicks it entails, and the new paths it opens up when the countdown timer hits.

Extra Cheese Please

In the year 2023 when things seem like they’re going down the dumpster and bad news keeps surfacing, we can rely on games to cheer us up, and not costing a bomb of up to US$60 onward. Pizza Tower is one such title to not only does that, but makes you engrossed with its aesthetics and choices of music (all good, by the by, with “It’s Pizza Time!” being the main theme that will be one of your 2023 earwigs). It will also make a better gamer out of you, enticing you to get better ranks for your stage playthroughs as you play them over and over again. The first run-through is great, with the second and possibly third one being gruelling as you go on a stage item(s) hunt.

Trust me when I say that Pizza Tower fills in that 2D platforming niche that can be enjoyed by casual fans and hardcore connoisseurs who long for Nintendo to make a new non-minigame Wario title that isn’t simplified garbage. With developer Tour De Pizza around keeping the dream alive, we don’t need it. Pizza Tower is a superior substitute that takes what its developers learn from past Wario Land platformers and makes it fresh again. You haven’t lived until you’ve had a Kirby Superstar samurai showdown-esque minigame against a gun-toting cowboy dough thing in a silhouette-styled level not unlike your Donkey Kong Country stages.

Final Score: 90/100