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humanoidgamingawesome · 2 years ago

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pizza tower is out! have you played it already ? if so, thoughts?

OF COURSE and, man it feels weird that the game is finally out officially. The demos for it have been probably my most played “game” over the past years, and I’ve played all of the demos available to Patreon backers plus some of the old public ones. I've been following for a long time through countless refinements and changes and do-overs and now it’s finally out, for good. I donated to this some years ago and now my name is in the credits of this thing! Feels pretty great!

I'm as biased as it gets in regards to it. It plays marvelously, it has one of the most fun characters to control ever made, endlessly replayable on the basis of that alone. The soundtrack is self-evidently kickass and has always been one of the biggest draws this game’s had to pull people in, the artstyle and animation being the other massive draw. Most of the big virtues of Pizza Tower are very self-evident, so instead I wanna talk a little on it's story and characters, because now that the game is out, it finally has a proper "canon' of sorts, in the sense that a lot of this stuff is no longer going to be rewritten or changed based on demos. Now Pizza Tower’s finally set-in-stone, of sorts, and that end result is what I wanna talk about:

I think Pizza Tower kind of had an uphill battle at first making sure it had an audience besides people who just showed up for the Wario Land-fix. Initially, that was the promise, it was designed to give people that fix that they weren’t gonna get from Nintendo themselves, and the game’s initial success in it’s demos kicked off that rise in what people now call Wario-likes, some of which are more blatant about it. The game initially played pretty much exactly as you’d expect a Wario Land fangame to be like and was set apart mainly by it’s distinct animation and catchy music, and maybe that could have been enough, but it evidently wasn’t, given how many undercooked demos it took for it to reach it’s current distinctive gameplay and appeal.

Of course, the Wario Land vibe may still be a big part of what people talk about in regards to Pizza Tower, but there was a very substantial shift over the years that I saw in real time, as the conversation around it shifted from “If you like Wario Land you should look into this new Pizza Tower thing, it seems like basically that with the serial numbers filed off”, to “Hey Pizza Tower rules, the music is kickass and the protagonist is very fast and the animation is super funny, you should play these demos, also it’s inspired by Wario games if you’re into those”. I actually didn’t even see Wario Land get brought up much at all in the last days since it’s launch, partially because Wario’s had his own comeback since 2018 (although just for the Ware games) but mainly because Pizza Tower succeeded in setting itself apart from it’s inspiration. It got people wanting the Pizza Tower-fix, and not just the bootleg-Wario-fix, if that makes sense.

And of course part of that comes from how Pizza Tower didn’t stick to just Wario games, but gradually took bits and pieces from stuff like Sonic, Earthworm Jim, Looney Tunes and Tiny Toons, some otherobscure defunct games that got brought up on occasion and etc, and then just kept throwing these gimmicks at a wall of beta testers and Patreon backers it accumulated to see what stuck and what didn’t. The game had a very small development team, and gradually acquired more and more of a following, and it made the most out of both.

I think a rather underrated aspect of the game is how Pizza Tower works at squeezing blood from stone in regards to it’s narrative and characters. The game follows in that platforming tradition of stock excuse plots that are as least obtrusive to the gameplay as they can possibly be, and for the longest time the demos and game didn’t even have one of those because no reason was settled (or needed) on why Peppino had to trek through these blasted towers fighting monsters while scared shitless the whole time, and a couple of different lore motivations were tried out over the years to explain some aspects (if anyone reading this is also in the PT Discord, you guys remember when Noise was some kind of weird shadow mirror self of Peppino? That was a thing for a bit, glad it got canned early). I want to emphasize how the trial and error approach of the development applied to Peppino’s character and the game’s story because I’m very much of a fan of what the game finally settled on: Peppino fighting to save his business from being destroyed.

Peppino is a miserable man who owns a failing pizza business and is struggling to make ends meet, who one day gets cornered by a giant pizza monster who lives on the tower across his shop, who tells him that he’s going to blow up and destroy his pizzeria, and so Peppino has no choice but to race against the clock to stop this from happening. Prior motivations tried out concepts like he destroyed “evil towers” as a job or was looking for secret ingredients to bake better pizzas, but the finished game cuts the filler and instead puts a giant bomb hanging over everything Peppino has, which is a shitty pizzeria, and sets him on collision course to cathartically smash the bomb.

The game chooses to emphasize Peppino’s poverty and struggles followed by blistering rage at the injustice he’s being inflicted with, and this is something that works better even just reflecting his basic design: though he is a chef, though he may put up ads of himself as a jolly cartoon, he cannot act like one to save his life, and if you look closer he’s actually just wearing a sleeveless shirt over black clothing: he can’t even afford an actual apron. He’s a failure who has very little to call his own, and he’s about to lose even that because some assface sitting high and mighty deemed it so: he’s a walking embodiment of an incredibly relatable frustration, and he’s going to smash the source of that frustration right in the fucking face.

You get this entire deal in the frames of animation Peppino goes through just before he faces down the final boss: he spots his place in the distance and looks dejectedly at it, gets scared when the boss looms down before him, and that fear gives way to shrieking rage as he prepares to throw down not just to save his business but as payback for all the shit he’s put up with the whole game, and MAN does the final fight make it all worth it

Because the game has basically no dialogue outside of in-game hints and flavor text, it has to put a lot of effort in making it’s cast shine non-verbally. Right from the start it was pitched as having a strong Earthworm Jim and Courage the Cowardly Dog influence, it was always playing around with as many cartoon tropes and gags as it could, and the end result in-game is that Pizza Tower does succeed big time in feeling like a cartoon show that could have been.

All of it’s levels are accompanied by title cards that present said stages as “episodes”, and all of them have built-in gimmicks with implied narratives like picking fights with pirates, taking a trip to space and back, going to jail and needing your friend to bail you out, getting stalked and hunted by monstrous animatronics until you get a shotgun that lets you hunt them back, and etc. There’s a level where you can surf through graveyards on the back of a corpse while looking scared shitless, and the Achievements later reveal Peppino used to know the dead guy when he was still alive, and so on. The core story is just there enough to make the final fight feel narratively satisfying, and along the way you get all these little bits and pieces that make this world richer and it’s characters more lively, enough that we can fill in the blanks and see how they would fit if they were part of a long-running franchise or some kind of wacko world with off-screen adventures before or after the game.

Gustavo wound up being one of the more pleasant surprises in the game. And not just gameplay-wise, since I honestly found playing Gustavo in the demos a chore but they buffed his moveset a lot in the game proper and made him a lot more fun to mess around with, but even character-wise. Ever since his planned spin-off didn’t take off Gustavo was kind of a throwaway character for the longest time without much of anything going on for him, with his in-game role as someone you'd deliver pizzas for and would beat you up if you failed (and was apparently your boss).

In-game, Gustavo is no longer your boss, in fact apparently he no longer knew Peppino before the game, he's just a guy who is going into the tower at the same time as you (and clearly more prepared since he’s got a map), tangled up in his own side-adventures taming and befriending a giant rat, who’s taking the time to help you out anyway. In-game he’s this nice, friendly character who is straightforward in a way Peppino can't be, he's got a kind of beady-eyed cuteness to him that Mario used to have in the old 2D titles (and a super deep smoker voice for contrast), and he winds up becoming your Luigi (...or maybe it’s the other way around and you’re his Luigi) in the sense that he complements and contrasts you as the secondary lead (and you sorta do Bro Attacks together at the end).

The game gets a lot of mileage out of the Gustavo and Brick dynamic as is in a way that makes it so Gustavo on his own doesn’t have to be as extravagant as Peppino or Noise, but still be funny and endearing enough as a protagonist that we can put Peppino aside to enjoy him just as much, maybe even more so depending on your preference. Gustavo is obviously very silly but silly in a lot of ways that Peppino can’t be, and I think the way the game treats him goes a long way towards lending Pizza Tower some more versatility in terms of humor and characterization.

I'm glad Mr Stick didn't wind up as a boss as planned. He's not terribly interesting or funny enough to be one, he isn't really anyone's favorite and I think McPig got more mileage out of him as an ally to you, and considering Peppino is inspired by Courage the Cowardly Dog, I think having a Eustace type character among your allies works pretty allright. He's not a character you would really see in a Wario game, Wario would never put up with being bossed around or scammed by some greedy jackass (that's his job), but Peppino is not Wario, he's got bills to pay and bigger issues to work through via violence and he can't really pick or choose his allies so, he's stuck with Mr Stick, the piece of shit landlord who rips you off constantly and you have no choice but to pay him, but who does help you progress at least so, eh.

(Art by @ketrindarkdragon)

I frankly loved Pepperman as is back when he was just the default boss / a stage hazard purely on the basis of his design and attack animation and of course his kickass theme, but his reinvention into a pretentious artist who sounds like Comic Book Guy was a pretty wonderful way to make a character out of him, not exactly what you’d expect out of the game’s Musclebound Bully boss character. He’s got that Squidward gag where he’s actually remarkably skilled at several different kinds of art, and going by the credits he’s apparently well-off for it, but he’s a self-obsessed prick who only makes self-portraits, and nobody in the cast thinks much of him as is (if you beat him without taking damage, you get an achievement called “The Critic”). He’s probably the character I would most enjoy playing as even though those plans were scrapped for good reason.

I’m glad that The Noise got a somewhat reduced role in-game as just a boss fight, I think this was the smart choice. For the longest time, Noise was the only other character in the game besides Peppino and he’s always been fairly popular, and he’s going to be made playable since he’s got most of his animations finished as is, so I think downplaying The Noise was a good call to make all the other elements stand out more. I’m not super into how his boss fight ends (I do like Noisette quite a bit actually, I just don’t think that bit was particularly funny) but I otherwise really like it, the fucker keeps opening himself up for beatings because he cannot stop literally giving you the middle finger, I like how well his fight emphasizes just how much Peppino and Noise hate each other, and I can’t wait to see what else is he gonna bring once made playable.

I’ll miss playable Vigilante, it was for the better yes but I’ll miss it. Still, he does make a better Boss, and obviously since his role is to be the Meta Knight of the game he does have to be the Cool Boss Who Hands You a Weapon. I’m glad that the game plays him straightforward, I’ve always loved the contrast of our Actual Cowboy Badass character being essentially a Goomba, a sentient pile of cheese with a cowboy hat and spurs (in concept there’s also a bit of Bandana Dee in him). He’s just gross and uncool enough on the basic concept that he can get away with being the coolest character in a way nobody else can be and in some ways only makes him more of a genuine badass, after you’ve steamrolled and gotten used to the game’s Goombas and then one of them fights back big time. I love the bit of him staring into the broken John at the final floor and quietly having a moment of concern he’s not allowing you to notice, I love him teaching the Toppins to shoot in the credits in preparation for the main villain’s next move, I really love this guy.

I fucking KNEW IT that Pizza Boy was gonna turn out to be a secret villain at some point, I fucking called it, as soon as they gave him a theme park in a now scrapped version of Pig City I knew that he was gonna be more than just a running gag. I actually didn’t expect Pizzaface to be fake, but I knew Pizza Boy was gonna show his true colors at some point. I however certainly did not expect for him to be basically Ronald McDonald, which is a choice that makes the most sense for the food mascot-themed villain who’s gonna boss around all the others and be the Punchable Face of Evil for a struggling chef and business owner to be set against.

Of course the real Pizza Boy is a scuzzy freak who’s nothing like the mascot he plasters around, that’s pretty much a running theme in the game at this point. He has perfectly deranged music completely unlike anything else in the game’s soundtrack, his boss section is wonderfully obnoxious, he’s a great final twist villain to have at a point in the game where you absolutely need the most punchable character of all time to take out Peppino’s frustrations in.

I didn’t expect the Pillar Johns to wind up having a mini-story in their own right depending on how you complete the game, where it does the Wario thing where the amount of treasures and loot you collect determines the ending. Except here instead of loot, collecting all the secret treasures determines whether or not John the pillar monster comes back to life after being broken and beaten into countless pieces and having his consciousness scattered into a hivemind across the entire tower, to the point where you are basically doing him a favor by smashing him at the end of every level. I didn’t expect the game to bother explaining why Gerome the janitor is following or helping you, let alone for the explanation to be so goddamn dark.

(You guys remember way waaay back in the earliest demos when John used to be this invincible thing you fed Toppins to so it would grant you passage? That was overhauled completely but turns out in the end, you still need to feed Pillar John to finish the game)

I find it funny how Peppino winds up incidentally rescuing the Tower from the Pizza, and that’s not even a funny overstatement, the game’s progression really does show how the Pizza was the bad guy in this scenario and the Tower was just corrupted along the way. It’s Pizza Tower, a game that has pizzas and towers, and you play as a pizza chef who’s threatened by a giant pizza (hiding another pizza) atop a giant tower, and so you smash the giant pizza and escape the tower and wind up saving the tower from the pizza while trying to save the pizza from the tower.

...I killed Snotty, I’m sorry you guys, I’ll do better next time.

Did I tell you guys about the soundtrack already? Because good God it has never stopped getting better and better, it alone is worth the price you pay for the game, and there’s a LOT of music in this thing even without counting the tracks that didn’t make it into release.

I think it's great that the game assembled it's core cast piecemeal over the development cycle from all these unlikely places over the years, it’s come such a long way from the days when it was just Peppino and Noise. I adored how the game’s ending and subsequent promos show how the Bosses stick around as cast members and showing snapshots of further adventures and mishaps for them. They all come back for the finale so Peppino can reach his breaking point, and they all escape together, and they all settle a truce over free pizza at Peppino’s place, still not much but still intact, still in one piece, after everything Peppino put up with to save it.

None of these characters belong together but they clearly don't belong anywhere else either, they're all a part of the "Receding Hairline Celebration Party" as the credits theme puts it, all these weird greasy knock-offs stuck together in the dumps, getting into trouble and duking it out, and playing cards together after it all quiets down and there’s some time to breathe, or dance.

....

Five years, man, that celebration party is definitely well deserved.

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