Pizza Tower is an absolute masterclass of game design and execution. The whole game throws back to the model given to us by Wario Land 4 and Wario Land: Shake Dimension, but on top of that the game brings one of the finest, most nuanced, most responsive, and most interesting speed systems ever put into a platformer. Peppino reaches speeds Sonic can only dream of while still remaining challenging and rewarding to control, with smooth transitions from running to sliding to wall-running all back and forth, complete with a few recovery options if you fumble to avoid overtly harsh punishment. Every aspect of this game is built around this blinding speed and it is incredibly fun from start to finish. You do not have to grab an enemy and throw him three times to various platforms here; every puzzle is about going fast in some manner. Even your transformations all have air dashes and great momentum. Despite being singularly focused on speed, the game manages to provide an enormous variety of ways to use speed to solve puzzles, to grab secrets, to keep combos going, to flow in all sorts of transitions between states, traps, terrain, and hazards. Even if you would never speedrun, this is a game about going fast just in general. Even if you cannot keep momentum more than one screen because you have awful reactions, you can and will still use and enjoy this speed system because so much of the game is fully committed to it.
The game itself is complete nonsense. Pizza chef Peppino must enter the Pizza Tower to... uh... maybe it makes more sense if you are Italian but, uh, there are levels, and once you get through them and hit some sad guy named John, the you are told "It's Pizza Time!" and then you are given a strict timer to escape the level, typically on a different route than you came in (Is this also an Italian thing???). Each level has a unique environment, theme, and typically different mechanics. Priests buff you to kill ghosts in one, in another you become a flying pizza box. There's even a stealth level that manages to keep the game's intense speed, which is just insane to even think about and crazier still to play. Each level maintains a wonderful sense of flow to go with Pizza Tower's speed addiction and each is worth replaying for rank well after you have cleared the main game. Every inch of this game is packed with beautiful, classic American cartoon animation mixed with a few of the uncanny reddit meme faces here and there, but the humor remains zany and good natured throughout. The boss fights are just as good, with the first boss alone being more interesting than every boss in Wario Land 4 combined. And the final boss, hell, the entire finale is just another masterclass, proof that even if your game makes absolutely no sense to non-Italians, that with enough gusto you can just make out of nowhere a finale as hype as any of the greatest video games or wrestling matches or anime final showdowns ever. The developers know precisely how to crescendo up in stakes, in power, to decrescendo to let you enjoy the power, to ramp it back up again to really make you work for it, to deflate when it is time to let the power fantasy part hit; the whole thing is a roller coaster put together by experts.
There simply is no question Pizza Tower deserves the coveted Game of the Year award. It is one of the finest releases in recent memory.
