Pizza Tower could be seen as the spiritual successor to Wario Land’s series, yet it stands on its own merits with its distinctive art style, amazing soundtrack, and some of the most innovative level designs ever seen in an indie game.
From its Five Night at Freddy ”’s-esque “Don’t Make a Sound” mode to an anxiety-inducing countdown that kicks in after each level, the game keeps surprising players with new ideas and challenges.
Level Design
This game contains 20 side-scrolling levels in which players must scale a tower to prevent its destruction, collect various items, and defeat enemies to increase their score and activate an escape sequence at the end of every level.
Peppino Spaghetti, an anxious and unforgiving pizza chef who owns a struggling pizzeria, finds himself threatened by Pizzaface – a gigantic sentient pizza that threatens his place of business. Peppino turns to Gustavo as his assistant to rescue his restaurant from destruction.
Pizza Tower was developed using the GameMaker engine and features high-resolution, pixel art that’s inspired by 90s Nicktoons. Composer Jeremy de Castel, known for his Wario Land series work, composed its music. Critics have lauded its gameplay, art style, and sense of speed as worthy successors to dormant Wario Land series titles.
Mechanics
The tutorial level serves to introduce players to Peppino’s movement controls and the fundamental mechanics of Pizza Tower R34. Set on an alien planet filled with pizza, this level instructs players on all of Peppino’s main moves – including toppings that don’t advance their rank system progress – including performing Shoulder Bash moves such as Pizza Granny showing how they work (a previous version also featured an example sign demonstrating them); both elements were later scrapped from this tutorial level.
This level contains a walled Discord server which requires users to link Steam and wait for it to manually verify them before joining.
Soundtrack
Pizza Tower’s soundtrack includes 73 songs, with many composed before ClascyJitto joined as an official composer; others were written after her arrival as well. Although available online, certain songs can only be heard within Patreon builds.
Music_Knight
This theme stands apart from its peers with no lyrics and plays only in a short corridor before The Crumbling Tower of Pizza. Its filename suggests it was initially intended as a theme for Knight transformations; its melody may also suggest potential drunk transformation themes, though some have speculated otherwise. Furthermore, Music_Knight also contains stock screams used in Earthworm Jim’s What the Heck scene.
ClascyJitto created one of its earliest escape-like songs for ClascyJitto that shares many similarities to Pesto Anchovi, especially about its tempo changes. An alternate version without these tempo changes exists but was never meant to be used; much like many of its other unused escape themes, this idea was scrapped for having separate escape themes for every level; eventually, though it created too much extra work for composers.
