Review: I love PIZZA TOWER, but I’m not sure if it loves me…
Ronan de Caste’s magnum opus has been a long time coming: formed right at the epicentre of pop-media nostalgia for the second millennium, when gross-out cartoons, action-platforming games and crude digital art programs collided in the minds of impressionable young schoolkids all across western civilisation. A lone musician and artist turned game developer scooping up collaborators across the internet and plugging away since at least 2018 on a game about a fat middle aged Italian man on a quest to save his struggling pizza business from imminent annihilation.
The internet watched on in anticipation as gameplay elements and story ideas were created, thrown out, added back in, reworked, tweaked and then thrown right back out again for five years based on either playtest feedback from independent patrons or the fickle whims of the game’s elusive and ever secretive lead visionary. A confluence of characters and set pieces that has set the fertile imagination of its player base alight by wearing its influences proudly on its sleeve while simultaneously stepping further beyond the limits of what those predecessors could ever have hoped to get away with in their time.
Simply put, Pizza Tower was going to form an audience no matter what and if this momentum keeps up, it wouldn’t be all that difficult to see it taking over the entire rest of the world at some point. But before this review goes any further, here’s some disclosure for anyone who isn’t fully in the know (I can’t make any safe assumptions on behalf of anyone who reads this, so it always helps to be on the safe side anyway): this game has gone through a multitude of changes even while concepts were still being scribbled out on scrap paper and the only version of Pizza Tower I have ever played is the one that I’m going to be dedicating this whole article to: the version that was finally released in full on Steam in early 2023.
I have intentionally held off until this version was made available while exposing myself to only the basic gameplay premise so as to go into the experience with as little preconceptions or emotional attachment as possible. I didn’t even watch any trailers or listen to any of the game’s music beforehand, that’s how determined I was to see this game unclouded by hype or bias. I am very much familiar with the media that Pizza Tower has drawn influence from, having also grown up with them myself during the 2000s, but I also wanted to ensure that my feelings and reactions towards this game here remain organic and genuine, so that my subsequent critique does not come across as insincere.
This is art we’re talking about, after all.
Pizza Tower is a very fast and intense game about a nervous wreck of an Italian chef pushed to his breaking point before being pushed all the way back again. His name is Peppino Spaghetti (naturally). He and his friends Gustavo, Mr. Sticks and Brick the giant dopey-eyed rat must ascend the imposing Pizza Tower of the game’s namesake, make acquaintance with the inhabitants, take out all the lode-bearing pillars in each of the game’s levels and send the whole thing crashing down before its master makes good on his threat to destroy Peppino’s humble restaurant.
The player ascends through five floors of the Pizza Tower, each floor housing four open doors leading to levels that will test the player’s endurance and sense of navigation, often themed around food. Imprisoned in each level are five sentient pizza toppings which must all be rescued in order to be able to face off against the colourful boss character that occupies the current floor. Defeat them and the next floor will be unlocked.
Peppino himself is more fluidly animated than his crude look would suggest in static screenshots and is also much faster than he may seem judging by physicality alone. Holding a button down will make him build up speed (even if the player is not pressing in any particular direction) until he becomes akin to a freight train that’s jumped the tracks, demolishing foes and breakable blocks on contact. In addition, Peppino himself does not have any stamina or health meter to inhibit him and aside from boss battles, can take countless hits from enemies and hazards with the only penalty for his missteps being a lower high score at the end of a stage.
In some instances, he even benefits from being harmed: getting trapped inside pizza boxes, eating hot peppers, being slathered in sticky cheese, rolled around like a bowling ball, stuffed into a wooden barrel or even becoming a literal ghost will grant unique status effects that change what Peppino can do, helping him overcome new challenges in turn. However, the player will need to revert Peppino back to his normal form at some point (with help from a perfectly normal exorcism) and though virtually invincible (even bottomless pits do not serve to set one’s progress back far), the player must still react very quickly to solid obstacles as Peppino runs forwards at mach-speeds: swerving left and right, ducking and rolling, dive-bombing after running past a sheer drop, belly flopping directly downward at full force and jumping at walls to run up the sides, leaping from side to side as hazards come hurtling into view. Oftentimes, the clutter, chaos and sheer speed can prove too much for one to be able to react to in a meaningful time frame without first memorising the exact sequence of events beforehand and rattling off button presses in turn like with a sheet of music notes.
This is by no means an accident: Pizza Tower wants nothing more than for its players to beat the game as fast as humanly possible before daring them to go through it all over again and do it even faster than last time.
There’s an entire set of end-game ranks, level-specific achievements and assistive menu options such as a nanosecond to hour-measuring stopwatch that all rely entirely on the player’s desire to know as many ins and outs of a level as there are to find and getting through them all as thoroughly and as quickly as possible (one of these endgame rank screens can only be seen by reaching the end credits in less than two hours).
When reaching one of the lode-bearing pillars at the end of a level, a countdown timer activates, forcing players to hightail it back to the level entrance, relying on their mental map of a level and their ability to adapt as detours are formed with old routes blocked off and new ones being the only way back. When this period of ‘Pizza Time’ ends with the countdown at zero, the master of the tower, ‘Pizza Face’ will hunt Peppino down and upon catching up, trashes the player’s current score, throws them out of the level and forces them to try it again all the way back at the very beginning. If a player has already beaten a level once and is feeling especially daring on their second go through, they can jump into a pizza portal next to the level entrance that transports them back to where they knocked out the pillar so that they can do the entire escape that they just did already a second time, all while the timer is still ticking down.
Peppino also has a handful of benefits and traversal abilities seemingly intended solely for shaving precious seconds off a run, requiring a player to already be running above walking speed for at least one second before they can be taken advantage of. Patrolling enemies become frozen in fear if the first they see of Peppino is him charging towards them at full speed. This can prove incredibly helpful, especially as enemies and bosses very often flit from vulnerable states to attack poses within just one frame of animation, though since more casual players will be less privy to certain control nuances and room layouts than those who play to construct a detailed plan in their head (some levels are apparently more fun to speed run than others depending on how much room for error they leave open), those more casual players may generally tend to go much slower and more carefully which ironically, will come back to bite them.
Also available to players (but again, only while they are running at full pelt) is an endless vertical jump that can send Peppino rocketing skywards at full unstoppable velocity and a mid-air shoulder barge, which can itself only be pulled off whilst performing this vertical jump, demonstrably so that the player can avoid killing their momentum by face-planting into the ceiling. As with the downward dive, a player would need to map out a level mentally through rote memorisation first before they were able to know exactly where and when these abilities could come in handy specifically for the purpose of getting through a level faster than before.
Layered on top of all this is a surprisingly versatile combat system comprised of punches, tackles, grabs, taunts, parries that require incredibly strict timing to pull off, tosses, chomps, spinning hammer throws, piledrivers and the aforementioned belly flops. Should a player land enough blows, avoid enough hazards, earn enough points from hidden treasures and collect enough clocks during pizza time to keep their performance up without so much as stopping to breathe before finally completing a second lap, they will be graded far above the standard D, C, B, A or S ranks and for their troubles, will instead be rewarded with the coveted ‘P’ rank: the highest accolade in the game.
Though this game is still entirely playable and beatable without the use of these abilities, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m inherently missing out by not being able to catch on as readily to this movement system as others have. Pizza Tower will allow an average player enough time to measuredly pace themselves, afford room to make mistakes and usually grade them with a modest B rank as basic courtesy whether or not they ever think to touch the myriad of optional challenges dedicated to each level, but it clearly was not made to let casual players like me in at the door as quickly compared to those who live for the highest score.
One could say that this is not the game for me and the amount of friction I feel while playing could possibly attest to this as someone who does not normally play games to seek out the fastest times or the most efficient runs. But on the other hand, I have absolutely enjoyed these sorts of time trial activities in games before, and not just in bite-sized formats as found in racing games or optional challenges found in other bigger franchises. Sometimes, I’ll sometimes get the urge to replay a game like Luigi’s Mansion, Banjo-Kazooie, Ratchet & Clank or Wario Land 4 (one of the biggest, if not absolute biggest influence on Pizza Tower itself) and sit back with a faint sense of pride at having beaten in a single day, a game that would have taken me around a week back in my childhood. It will be because of all the times I replayed those games over and over on previous urges that I am able to complete them faster than before. Every time I come back year after year, I get to understand the intricacies inherent to those games more: the ways in which certain strategies and approaches can be applied, optimised and prepared in anticipation of predetermined events in the game proper.
Pizza Tower clearly wants to be played in the same way, and I would love to play it in the way it wants to be played, but while the aforementioned games initially let me in as a casual onlooker and opened up its complexities later as they went on, Pizza Tower seems very much intended for those who are either already entrenched in the “speed-running” mindset or have just started to explore it already in games prior to this one. This appeal to hardcore speed-run enthusiasts is reflected in the difficulty curve. Most games tend to start off on the easy side before carefully ramping up in difficulty as the experience goes on before testing everything a player has been taught in one final climactic challenge. It’s not always the case, nor does it necessarily have to be, but from a more casual perspective, Pizza Tower feels like it starts off at the halfway point of that difficulty chart, before reaching the height of its potential midway through the game and then plateauing out for the remainder of its play time.
In my view, the focus on blazing fast speed of gameplay may also come at a detriment to Pizza Tower’s otherwise marvellous presentation. The game’s tone and style is conveyed with an instantly recognisable earnest jankiness that proves to have a lot more care and thought put into it than the initial garishness may initially suggest. Indeed, the way its own art clashes with itself at times is used for comedic effect as Peppino himself is twisted and contorted into various shapes and expressions, with genres and emotional stakes fluctuating on the fly as the game unfolds with very thoughtful consideration for pacing and timing.
Sometimes however, visual information can feel as though its been lost somewhere and I don’t just mean this in the sense of readable gameplay information. This I believe extends to the story of Pizza Tower, for there is indeed a narrative being portrayed beyond the basic premise summarised prior. In the game’s cinematic opening that plays upon booting up the game and which sets the events of the game in motion, Peppino is visited by a floating pizza with a face constructed on it which tells the Italian chef of how a giant laser on top of the tower next door is all set to blow his restaurant to smithereens.
That floating sentient pizza is meant to be the game’s villain ‘Pizza Face’: the antagonistic force that controls the Pizza Tower itself come down to gloat at Peppino about his plans. When I first saw this scene play out however, the way it was presented made me think that this floating sentient pizza was a figment of Peppino’s paranoid imagination, manifested to feed on his feverish anxiety and compelling him to lash out at absolutely anything else around him in the hopes that all his problems would go away if something big gets broken. It reminded me of Don Quixote (pronounced Donkey-hoe-tay) charging at windmills with his lance, believing them to be fearsome giants.
Until the set of final challenges at the end of the game, I wasn’t aware that Pizza Face even chases after the player at all when Pizza Time ends. I assumed that after knocking the pillar out at the end of a level, the ceiling would just collapse on top of Peppino at any moment (which funnily enough, was apparently planned for pre-release test versions of the game), leading to me pre-emptively resetting the level in anxiety before the game would get to show me what actually ends up happening.
Those giant pillars also have a face, a name and an entire level on the first floor of the tower dedicated to their likeness, ‘Pillar John’. What I did not know was that they have an entire backstory all to themselves, supposedly suggested through the environment and character animations: a supposed friend to the tower’s janitor, imprisoned and cloned several times with defects thrown into the level named ‘John Gutter’, the original John becoming an empty husk that can only be revived by finding items hidden in all the janitor closets throughout each of the game’s levels.
The game rarely has time or space to explain much beyond brief snippets of information gleamed from short dialogue interactions and visual easter eggs, almost all of which were completely lost on me, because I didn’t feel like I would be playing it “right” if I wasn’t hurtling through it all at a mile-per-minute. In contrast to the bouncy and memorable designs of the characters and overall environment themes, the levels themselves seemed more often to be constructed of thematically appropriate blocks and tiles against mostly static backgrounds to prioritise the twitchy reflexive movement challenges over helping the player more readily memorise key locations in a self-contained beginning-to-end arc (though there are some levels that do admittedly do this, just not that many). Each level is even introduced with a title card reminiscent of the wacky cartoon shows that it draws inspiration from, so it feels strange to me that a majority of the levels don’t always go the full distance in this regard.
As mentioned at the beginning of this review, Pizza Tower has seen many tweaks and edits throughout its development: some minor, others major. I may be horribly wrong about this, but I suspect that some key pieces of character and narrative information were probably taken as read by developers and play testers who were perhaps more knowledgeable to the workings and developments of earlier versions of the game as they were being tinkered around with. As a consequence however, these story details in the moment feel either completely absent or lacking in substance, either because they were repurposed or thrown out wholesale.
Why is there a level themed around Peppino being thrust into a great big war (appropriately enough named simply ‘War’)? Because supposedly the level was going to draw on Peppino’s planned backstory as a war veteran and pulling Peppino into a spiral of madness and shellshock, but the concept was retconned out of the final game mid-development, its status as to canonicity apparently in contention between individual creators of the game itself, leaving players to draw their own conclusions. Mr. Sticks, the savvy accountant-type who takes money from Peppino and opens up boss fight doors in return was originally going to be a boss fight himself, now barely getting a few seconds of introduction during the game’s opening cutscene to even briefly establish and summarise his relation to Peppino. Playing the game, I initially thought he was an underhanded inhabitant of the tower itself; why else would he demand money from Peppino before letting him access more of the place he wants to destroy?
All of these different nuggets of detail no doubt intended to flesh out the world and the characters, now only barely seen in the periphery as I blur past it all in the blink of an eye, the game itself egging me on to go even faster. I could go back and slowly pour over the details if I wanted to, but in spite of the presentation enticing me in, I get the nagging feeling once again that the rest of the game doesn’t want me to do this and even then, I feel as though I can’t acclimatise enough to Pizza Tower’s sense of speed to master the game’s systems as I want to.
This is what I meant with the title of this review: the game doesn’t seem to let me in as much as I want it to.
I don’t want to make it sound like I’m down on Pizza Tower because I am absolutely not; my misgivings are not a reflection of this game’s quality but rather of my specific affinity for visual storytelling. A review can only ever speak exclusively for the writer’s own experience, but I don’t want to make it sound like this game is any slouch in terms of art or gameplay either. The developers of this game clearly poured a lot of effort into the game’s design, and those efforts have paid off handsomely with a fan community surrounding the game that doesn’t seem to stop growing. Even before it was released, Pizza Tower has seen fan-made expansions, music, artwork (one of which was made by me, even) and videos of people gushing over their fastest times and highest scores: not even for the sake of outward competition with others but rather to show others that they managed to do it. Clearly this game has done a lot of things right and just because it didn’t live up to what I wanted from it doesn’t mean that it didn’t achieve what it ultimately set out for itself.
Again, I reiterate that I still had a lot of fun with Pizza Tower, grievances aside. Even if I didn’t understand much of what was happening in terms of its pure visual storytelling, the artwork, animations and entertaining wordless humour helps the game rise above its inspirations and stand apart as something all its own, keeping me going just to see what else the game could possibly throw at me next (I certainly was not expecting an extended cameo from Mort the Chicken of all things). I also look forward to seeing what the fans make of them and how they interpret them all. Even if I couldn’t get to grips with all the movement abilities on offer and push myself towards faster times, it was still a blast to play and I was left satisfied with my time after seeing the game through to its amazingly well-constructed conclusion, happily settling for about 60% overall completion in the end. It’s probably not going to hook absolutely everyone who plays it and those who do get hooked might not end up coming back again and again in the way that most of the game’s ardent fans have done already. But even so, I still argue that even if you are a complete newcomer like I was, you should still buy and play Pizza Tower anyway. Even if I didn’t enjoy the game to its fullest, I still enjoyed it nonetheless and I’ll definitely be here ready and waiting for whatever game comes next.
Whether you decide to come back for more, or play it once and immediately put it down, you will probably never have played anything quite like Pizza Tower.
Pizza Tower was created and published by Tour De Pizza and is available to purchase on Steam for £14.99. The soundtrack is available as an add-on for £8.50.