Pizza Tower

2026-07-25

Pizza Tower Pizza Tower make-a me fuckin glower

Bounce the rat, bounce the man, shit's about to hit the fan

I wrote that at 10 AM the morning after I finished Pizza Tower. Compelled by an illness I contracted as soon as I booted up the game.

The pathogen: art like a lost Rocko's Modern Life episode rendered in MS Paint. A soundtrack that sprints right out the gate with a rippling Rhodes before popping into a mix of meth-head manic and unnecessarily funky. As you blitz through the levels, ideas arrive too fast to be introduced--here you're a hideous dwarf man riding a giant rat, here you're a pizza box flapping your own halves as wings, now you're in a bubble, now you’re cheese.

And underneath all of it, the speed, as Peppino builds his momentum and warps into an angry Italian-wheelchair-man hybrid ripping the level apart with infinite traction that has him defying gravity, treating walls like the floor, and enemies like so much gravel sprayed out the back of a truck's tires. This is the illness made manifest, a fever that grips my mind, driving me forward with teeth clenched. A singular purpose to go faster, to not stop. My geriatric hands long to put the controller down and flex their fingers, but I power through because my mind is broiling in a brick oven imported from Napoli.

Hot pepper full of rage, who put this freak in a cage?

So why do the levels stop me so often? Fork boys planted to trip you, sword guys you can't barrel through, cramped rooms that ask you to creep. For a game yelling Do Not Slow Down with every level ending in a mad dash with a timer, it puts a startling amount of work into killing momentum. The game hands you the most delicious pizza you've ever tasted, and every fourth bite you find a thumbtack baked into the pie.

Gloopy gloppy pizza sauce, don't-a I like the boss? I do. Eventually. Pepperman had me furious--always just out of reach, a tiny window to land an attack--before I worked out that the button to make Peppino pose is actually a god damned counter. After that most of the roster went down without much of a fight--Vigilante's meant to be the hard one and he got Easy-Bake Oven'd. Fake Peppino was the one that actually got me. Slept on it, came back fresh the next day, dodged damn near everything he had. The bosses are the one place this game stops tripping you and just fights you, and it turns out that's where it's best.

Except for the final boss who is a boss rush and can eat a dick pizza. I turned on invulnerability to cruise past the dweeb.

Did it once, won't do it twice.

My gnarled hands need some fuckin ice.

We could talk about the skill ceiling here, but I ain't interested. I certainly ain't interested in replaying levels to get an S rating. I was ready to wave bye to Pizza Hitler and move on with my life. And yet that last level--where you speed-run the entire tower in reverse, the game showering you in all those gimmicks it doled out along the way--left a big greasy smile on my face. I came out the other side with eight seconds on the clock, put the controller down, and woke up the next morning writing poetry about a rat.