Accompaniment
The strong appeal of Pizza Tower style has already been spoken for. Its caught on like wildfire to the point of rampant fanaticism, friend of mine Appreciations articulates with a frenzy that
"I really think this game is one of the best indie games ever made and just like pizza in general, nobody dislikes all pizza. You will find something to enjoy here and odds are, you'll love it." Link
In more specific terms, Jenny accurately relates the appeal here to that of crass 90s cartoon animation.
"At its core, Pizza Tower is an ode to all that 90s stuff that I love. It's a bit ugly in style, but in that deliberate Ren & Stimpy or Ed, Edd n' Eddy kinda way, and I warmed up to it almost immediately." ending her sentiments with "At the end of the day, yeah this is really fucking good. Believe the hype, etc etc" link.
Along with this I've felt the sensibility of Pizza Tower's strong appraisal in a lot of the rest of my online life to be it social media use, internet discussions, algorithm content praising the game, streamers enjoying it, etc. The hype seems neverending, it's a shame though because after completing it with a 66% mark I feel entirely disconnected from this perspective. The title overall feels like all style and no substance. All cheese and no sauce.
There are so many glaring flaws with Pizza Tower's (2023) fundamental design in my view that it leaves me baffled nobody else has spoken for them yet. In order to vent my frustrations most effectively I want to first take a step back and say that even though people have been laudatory it would be false to say there has been no criticism about where it falls short. To turn back to Jenny and Appreciations for a moment they've both offered something in this regard. Appreciations mentions that the down attack is finnicky as sometimes it will input a swipe attack over a ground pound, and that they felt no motivation to go 100%. In a more controversial post ponders on bigoted jokes that the developer plays into highlighting his sense of offensive stereotype as a form of humor. Meanwhile, Jenny focuses more on hit detection and the deception of health, particularly for her in the case of bosses though I should say I experienced this outside of just boss fights as well.
While I could quibble on the ways in which these are accurate or not (the one on stereotypes for gags is especially accurate, unfortunately, you have the happy merchant grabbing you (semitic stereotype), and large 'crosseyed' baseball player that mistakes you for a ball (retardation visual stereotype) just to name two. However I want to shelf those concerns and focus on the issues I have with the design fundamentals.
Pizza Tower tries to use a 'ranking' formula of design to motivate player engagement, something that you might be familiar with from 3D sonic titles like Sonic Adventure (1998) or platinum action titles like Bayonetta (2009). The problem is this badge mastery system contrasts with the nessecity to check in nooks and crannies for secrets, thereby slowing you down and killing your combo. No matter what you do your first run of any level is probably going to be around a B at best because you'll be trying to comb for the 5 ingredients on every level, which are necessary to complete the story. The idea here is that in freeing them it works as a reward motivator, but due to the fact that they and the secrets are often tucked out from a linear runpath, even slightly, they instead become a collectible you have to remember and stop for. More to the point this combines with digging for secrets and 'poking' for an optimal route. Unlike the concise 1 minute platforming tests like Dustforce (2012) or Super Meat Boy (2010), Pizza Tower's levels go on for anywhere from 4 to 10 minutes. This sets in a sense of fatigue at individual level mastery where you have to try and fail constantly to get it precise. The problem is that there's no tangible reward for getting better at the individual levels besides an overall progression mark. If you 'P' a boss or a level the number percent goes up, but nothing cosmetic or informative happens as a result of doing well or poorly, there's no unlockable content as an extrinsic motivator. NPCs in the tower don't comment on your performances. No clothing options are unlocked. Peppino doesn't calm down or gain confidence. It's just an achievement for achievements sake.
This is an issue because the 5 off path collectable ingredients you have to catch arent as optional for completion as they first appear. In the beginning the threshold ratio between ingredients needed from each level to unlock a new floor is 50%, one might think based on that that you may need to pick up ingredients but not worry about them too much but you'd be wrong. By the end that percentage rises to a dramatic 90%. The issue is since there is 5 ingredients per level you have to find you actually have to be thorough on each level in finding them. Based on whether the player knows this going in or not makes a big difference because the end you're going to be forced to go back to levels you had skipped over or didn't get all the ingredients from.
Putting the ratio threshold for completion this high is frustrating because its easy to miss an occasional ingredient, and many of the levels themselves are frustrating. Once you get near the finish line the story is practically begging you to climb back down and finish it out a little more through this padding mechanic. End game backtracking is meant to play into that sense of nostalgia and wistfulness, 'I came this far and now look, I'm so much better'. However, because of the amount of gimmicks and gags per level there's not a fundamental sense of player improvement. What happens instead is just a fetch quest followed by, to be vague about the ending, an effusive celebration of itself 'remember this boss? remember this mechanic?' it's ultimately shallow though, because you unlock nothing from being good at the individual levels themselves. This creates a contradiction where you are rewarded for doing the bare minimum but almost not at all for exceeding expectations, as the range between both becomes smaller as the game goes on. The S and P ranks for non boss levels are functionally 'challenge runs' of the game, you're likely to get a B or better without even trying. So by the end all you end up feeling is that you know a few more mechanics. There's no sense of growth or player immersion.
Contrast this to another platformer like say Celeste (2018) where the window of player ability to complete the game is incredibly large. There's a wound rope of difficulty around optional yet visible cherries and toggle accessibility options. Celeste respects the players time by outlining that the Cherries serve no explicit function, they are a side challenge that implicitly build a sense of character for the player, focusing more on building its story elements instead. On the other hand then Pizza Tower deceives the player by telling the them the collectibles matter but not making it clear how much they do. By keeping the rewards of its goals ambiguous it relies on the player to feel that desire to explore its levels and master them. When the player finds out that they don't get anything for doing these side quests it taints future experience of play. When I restart playing Pizza Tower again I know despite all the stats and checklists thrown at me that only the ingredients matter. The secrets, rankings, and achievements are meaningless. However since they aren't treated that way, since they are conveyed as important visual stimuli it becomes a part of play that gets in the way rather than enhancing it. In Celeste the cherries don't mean anything besides knowing how much goes into the pie at the end, but since you were always told that and then the story keeps quiet about their inclusion for the entire run, you can adjust on a new playthrough how much or little you feel like caring about that.
This was really difficult to word properly but the end experience is that I felt like I was being needlessly graded and told to backtrack rather than feel a part of the world. Something needed to have changed in this system for me to feel comfortable, either:
1. Easier: The levels needed to be overall shorter in length so I could master them
2. Less Grading: Less visual information about how 'well im doing' needed to be conveyed to me
3. More Lore: The secrets and rankings needed to unlock cosmetic or lore content in the world for me to feel more immersed for doing well
4. Less Padding: The ratio of ingredients need to complete needed to be a stable reasonable threshold 50 - 75%, and the final level needed to be cut
5. Less Obfuscation: The eye secrets needed to be removed entirely so that I could focus less on 'combing' levels for extra points and more on actual execution
Without any of these taking place this experience has become 'style at all costs' which while amusing in moments becomes distressing as a design philosophy. It feels like a design philosophy chosen to keep the player playing as much as possible so you can see all it has to offer. As nice as it looks, it comes off as desperate and frustrating.
Less abstractly a few other miscellaneous issues
-Proximity score doesnt matter since its just about collecting as much as you can and keeping a chain, so the score should only show up at the end
-Camera needed to be zoomed out from the player a bit more because you end up just flailing at high speeds as it is
-If you turn the HUD off a -5 still ticks in the top left corner during the runback portion which is very distracting
-The bosses only test your postitioning and not your ability to execute running maneuvers which feels not in pace with the point of the game
-They put the best song in the tutorial, a catchy bass song with tons of fancy hi hat use, the other songs aren't half as good so they feel weaker. Probably just shouldn't have even used it because it makes everything feel disappointing
-The levels that kill you based on time have an unreasonably high completion threshold compared to end level runbacks, meaning you'll have to repeat them more than you would a normal stage
-there needs to be more discreet 'Grading thresholds' between A and S rank for non boss stages. S Rank forces a 2nd run through the level out of a player which borders on challenge mode feeling. Adding a couple more ranks around this point in the scale would do a lot to implicitly reward the player for doing better.
-The happy merchant bit in the Slums really bummed me out, like what the fuck man
I want to end on one last note. Appreciations nailed one thing I agree on, they noted that "You've got yourself a winner in Pizza Tower and that winner here is adrenaline." My qualm is that rewarding adrenalinic high intensity action response puts a person in a more impulse driven mode. I'm not sure that mode is 'good'. Anecdotally, this specific form of adrenaline puts me in a state of frustrated anger once I start to feel like I cant do better or the game is fucking with me. That anger boils me up and tends to make me dysphoric as a result. I'm not sure how much this applies to other people but I'm not too convinced that rewarding a surplus adrenaline hormones on tap like this from titles like Sekiro or Pizza Tower etc is actually good for us? It certainly isnt good for me, that's why I tend to play 'non difficult' story focused titles. I've noticed people say I'm not trying hard enough, but I wonder especially looking at how social media rewards impulsive thinking if its possible people have it backwards. Maybe everyone else is trying too hard to get that spike, and telling me I need to, as well.
Look, I'm not saying that it's healthy I respond to action input with the rage I do by any means, but I'm far from the only rage gamer. Like, I've never seen somebody rage quit a visual novel for example. It's always the people fucking up in rhythm games breaking stuff, its always the League mates freaking the fuck out about not having place down a ward etc. It's never the Final Fantasy nerds having fits. Again these are all anecdotes but its just food for thought. At the very least it explains my preference against it and why I tend to be so critical of finding design harmony in it.
The strong appeal of Pizza Tower style has already been spoken for. Its caught on like wildfire to the point of rampant fanaticism, friend of mine Appreciations articulates with a frenzy that
"I really think this game is one of the best indie games ever made and just like pizza in general, nobody dislikes all pizza. You will find something to enjoy here and odds are, you'll love it." Link
In more specific terms, Jenny accurately relates the appeal here to that of crass 90s cartoon animation.
"At its core, Pizza Tower is an ode to all that 90s stuff that I love. It's a bit ugly in style, but in that deliberate Ren & Stimpy or Ed, Edd n' Eddy kinda way, and I warmed up to it almost immediately." ending her sentiments with "At the end of the day, yeah this is really fucking good. Believe the hype, etc etc" link.
Along with this I've felt the sensibility of Pizza Tower's strong appraisal in a lot of the rest of my online life to be it social media use, internet discussions, algorithm content praising the game, streamers enjoying it, etc. The hype seems neverending, it's a shame though because after completing it with a 66% mark I feel entirely disconnected from this perspective. The title overall feels like all style and no substance. All cheese and no sauce.
There are so many glaring flaws with Pizza Tower's (2023) fundamental design in my view that it leaves me baffled nobody else has spoken for them yet. In order to vent my frustrations most effectively I want to first take a step back and say that even though people have been laudatory it would be false to say there has been no criticism about where it falls short. To turn back to Jenny and Appreciations for a moment they've both offered something in this regard. Appreciations mentions that the down attack is finnicky as sometimes it will input a swipe attack over a ground pound, and that they felt no motivation to go 100%. In a more controversial post ponders on bigoted jokes that the developer plays into highlighting his sense of offensive stereotype as a form of humor. Meanwhile, Jenny focuses more on hit detection and the deception of health, particularly for her in the case of bosses though I should say I experienced this outside of just boss fights as well.
While I could quibble on the ways in which these are accurate or not (the one on stereotypes for gags is especially accurate, unfortunately, you have the happy merchant grabbing you (semitic stereotype), and large 'crosseyed' baseball player that mistakes you for a ball (retardation visual stereotype) just to name two. However I want to shelf those concerns and focus on the issues I have with the design fundamentals.
Pizza Tower tries to use a 'ranking' formula of design to motivate player engagement, something that you might be familiar with from 3D sonic titles like Sonic Adventure (1998) or platinum action titles like Bayonetta (2009). The problem is this badge mastery system contrasts with the nessecity to check in nooks and crannies for secrets, thereby slowing you down and killing your combo. No matter what you do your first run of any level is probably going to be around a B at best because you'll be trying to comb for the 5 ingredients on every level, which are necessary to complete the story. The idea here is that in freeing them it works as a reward motivator, but due to the fact that they and the secrets are often tucked out from a linear runpath, even slightly, they instead become a collectible you have to remember and stop for. More to the point this combines with digging for secrets and 'poking' for an optimal route. Unlike the concise 1 minute platforming tests like Dustforce (2012) or Super Meat Boy (2010), Pizza Tower's levels go on for anywhere from 4 to 10 minutes. This sets in a sense of fatigue at individual level mastery where you have to try and fail constantly to get it precise. The problem is that there's no tangible reward for getting better at the individual levels besides an overall progression mark. If you 'P' a boss or a level the number percent goes up, but nothing cosmetic or informative happens as a result of doing well or poorly, there's no unlockable content as an extrinsic motivator. NPCs in the tower don't comment on your performances. No clothing options are unlocked. Peppino doesn't calm down or gain confidence. It's just an achievement for achievements sake.
This is an issue because the 5 off path collectable ingredients you have to catch arent as optional for completion as they first appear. In the beginning the threshold ratio between ingredients needed from each level to unlock a new floor is 50%, one might think based on that that you may need to pick up ingredients but not worry about them too much but you'd be wrong. By the end that percentage rises to a dramatic 90%. The issue is since there is 5 ingredients per level you have to find you actually have to be thorough on each level in finding them. Based on whether the player knows this going in or not makes a big difference because the end you're going to be forced to go back to levels you had skipped over or didn't get all the ingredients from.
Putting the ratio threshold for completion this high is frustrating because its easy to miss an occasional ingredient, and many of the levels themselves are frustrating. Once you get near the finish line the story is practically begging you to climb back down and finish it out a little more through this padding mechanic. End game backtracking is meant to play into that sense of nostalgia and wistfulness, 'I came this far and now look, I'm so much better'. However, because of the amount of gimmicks and gags per level there's not a fundamental sense of player improvement. What happens instead is just a fetch quest followed by, to be vague about the ending, an effusive celebration of itself 'remember this boss? remember this mechanic?' it's ultimately shallow though, because you unlock nothing from being good at the individual levels themselves. This creates a contradiction where you are rewarded for doing the bare minimum but almost not at all for exceeding expectations, as the range between both becomes smaller as the game goes on. The S and P ranks for non boss levels are functionally 'challenge runs' of the game, you're likely to get a B or better without even trying. So by the end all you end up feeling is that you know a few more mechanics. There's no sense of growth or player immersion.
Contrast this to another platformer like say Celeste (2018) where the window of player ability to complete the game is incredibly large. There's a wound rope of difficulty around optional yet visible cherries and toggle accessibility options. Celeste respects the players time by outlining that the Cherries serve no explicit function, they are a side challenge that implicitly build a sense of character for the player, focusing more on building its story elements instead. On the other hand then Pizza Tower deceives the player by telling the them the collectibles matter but not making it clear how much they do. By keeping the rewards of its goals ambiguous it relies on the player to feel that desire to explore its levels and master them. When the player finds out that they don't get anything for doing these side quests it taints future experience of play. When I restart playing Pizza Tower again I know despite all the stats and checklists thrown at me that only the ingredients matter. The secrets, rankings, and achievements are meaningless. However since they aren't treated that way, since they are conveyed as important visual stimuli it becomes a part of play that gets in the way rather than enhancing it. In Celeste the cherries don't mean anything besides knowing how much goes into the pie at the end, but since you were always told that and then the story keeps quiet about their inclusion for the entire run, you can adjust on a new playthrough how much or little you feel like caring about that.
This was really difficult to word properly but the end experience is that I felt like I was being needlessly graded and told to backtrack rather than feel a part of the world. Something needed to have changed in this system for me to feel comfortable, either:
1. Easier: The levels needed to be overall shorter in length so I could master them
2. Less Grading: Less visual information about how 'well im doing' needed to be conveyed to me
3. More Lore: The secrets and rankings needed to unlock cosmetic or lore content in the world for me to feel more immersed for doing well
4. Less Padding: The ratio of ingredients need to complete needed to be a stable reasonable threshold 50 - 75%, and the final level needed to be cut
5. Less Obfuscation: The eye secrets needed to be removed entirely so that I could focus less on 'combing' levels for extra points and more on actual execution
Without any of these taking place this experience has become 'style at all costs' which while amusing in moments becomes distressing as a design philosophy. It feels like a design philosophy chosen to keep the player playing as much as possible so you can see all it has to offer. As nice as it looks, it comes off as desperate and frustrating.
Less abstractly a few other miscellaneous issues
-Proximity score doesnt matter since its just about collecting as much as you can and keeping a chain, so the score should only show up at the end
-Camera needed to be zoomed out from the player a bit more because you end up just flailing at high speeds as it is
-If you turn the HUD off a -5 still ticks in the top left corner during the runback portion which is very distracting
-The bosses only test your postitioning and not your ability to execute running maneuvers which feels not in pace with the point of the game
-They put the best song in the tutorial, a catchy bass song with tons of fancy hi hat use, the other songs aren't half as good so they feel weaker. Probably just shouldn't have even used it because it makes everything feel disappointing
-The levels that kill you based on time have an unreasonably high completion threshold compared to end level runbacks, meaning you'll have to repeat them more than you would a normal stage
-there needs to be more discreet 'Grading thresholds' between A and S rank for non boss stages. S Rank forces a 2nd run through the level out of a player which borders on challenge mode feeling. Adding a couple more ranks around this point in the scale would do a lot to implicitly reward the player for doing better.
-The happy merchant bit in the Slums really bummed me out, like what the fuck man
I want to end on one last note. Appreciations nailed one thing I agree on, they noted that "You've got yourself a winner in Pizza Tower and that winner here is adrenaline." My qualm is that rewarding adrenalinic high intensity action response puts a person in a more impulse driven mode. I'm not sure that mode is 'good'. Anecdotally, this specific form of adrenaline puts me in a state of frustrated anger once I start to feel like I cant do better or the game is fucking with me. That anger boils me up and tends to make me dysphoric as a result. I'm not sure how much this applies to other people but I'm not too convinced that rewarding a surplus adrenaline hormones on tap like this from titles like Sekiro or Pizza Tower etc is actually good for us? It certainly isnt good for me, that's why I tend to play 'non difficult' story focused titles. I've noticed people say I'm not trying hard enough, but I wonder especially looking at how social media rewards impulsive thinking if its possible people have it backwards. Maybe everyone else is trying too hard to get that spike, and telling me I need to, as well.
Look, I'm not saying that it's healthy I respond to action input with the rage I do by any means, but I'm far from the only rage gamer. Like, I've never seen somebody rage quit a visual novel for example. It's always the people fucking up in rhythm games breaking stuff, its always the League mates freaking the fuck out about not having place down a ward etc. It's never the Final Fantasy nerds having fits. Again these are all anecdotes but its just food for thought. At the very least it explains my preference against it and why I tend to be so critical of finding design harmony in it.
8 Comments
Also I didn't touch on this point at all but one rather keen rebuttal I've seen is that the feeling of imperfectness and awkwardness works in terms of getting in with Peppino's sense of anxiety. This is fair, I think the story just should have had a more firm build up about Peppino and his friend Gustavo's relationships to the Bosses and general world though. Everything happens so spontaneously that no sense of tension or friendship is ever established. Throw in a few more monologues about the world and introduce a set up for the fears Peppino has to fight against and this argument would have worked fine for me, but there is no writer on the project so the result just comes off feeling shallow and unfinished. I think the game in general is over reliant on visual expressivity. Why did we like those gross 90s cartoons like this? Well its because they were quite talkative plot structures. There's no sense of a writers hand, the only words in game come from a tutorializing character named Pizza Granny who only gives non sequitor jokes and tutorial tips. Without character building moments through monologues or environmental storytelling, no sense of deliberate contrast between Peppino and world is felt to justify a character centered appreciation of the work. Which is a real shame because the protagonist and NPCs are actually quite endearing.
This comment was deleted
Also it needed a fast reset button, like i was trying to getting the timing down to get the 2 minute achievement on level 1, and this amount of pausing to reset to try for it got on my nerves.
Fixed the incorrect pronouns for somebody I referenced in this post, apologies for that. They hadn't mentioned the error to me at the time in personal correspondence at the time, and I hadn't checked their bio since then. >~<
I love this review because I really agree with pretty much everything said here, even though a large majority of it didn't bother me personally when I was playing the first time through. still, you're so right about it all.
@MOONTRIPS
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I'm glad you had fun with it and the progression system with the collectibles wasn't a problem in your experience. This reply reinforces for me my strategic decision not to tag a post with my score because I'm sure it would have caused people to be too up and arms with some of my complaints to hear me out. I can definitely feel people rolling their eyes at the intensity I take to this stuff sometimes. I just try and think about the longer non hype cycle scale of this stuff personally. I'm glad you had fun but I think I've played so many of this specific kind of high octane referential game by this point that I'm worn out with it by this point. Maybe it's a mode of a thought thing or maybe I'm just a snob. Either way I'm glad that you were able to find something from it and hope to see you around again at some point. No compulsion to, but if you're interested in what I do find fun and how I reflect on it, feel free to check out my Magic Vigilante post.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I'm glad you had fun with it and the progression system with the collectibles wasn't a problem in your experience. This reply reinforces for me my strategic decision not to tag a post with my score because I'm sure it would have caused people to be too up and arms with some of my complaints to hear me out. I can definitely feel people rolling their eyes at the intensity I take to this stuff sometimes. I just try and think about the longer non hype cycle scale of this stuff personally. I'm glad you had fun but I think I've played so many of this specific kind of high octane referential game by this point that I'm worn out with it by this point. Maybe it's a mode of a thought thing or maybe I'm just a snob. Either way I'm glad that you were able to find something from it and hope to see you around again at some point. No compulsion to, but if you're interested in what I do find fun and how I reflect on it, feel free to check out my Magic Vigilante post.
Side note but I'm very glad to see you like Moon RPG, I've only played the first 4 hours or so of it before getting stuck, but its a great game. The animalese in it is unmatched and the way the baker speaks in that game in particular is stuck in my head.
@Erato_Heti your feelings are valid! I've never played a game quite like Pizza Tower before, but given what everyone was saying, I had to give it a try. I do like Wario Land, namely 2 and 3. I'm a big fan of Wario himself too. so idk, there was some sense of obligation, but I took my time getting to it. with Pizza Tower, I didn't get pulled in initially, but I kept going. and then I got pulled in. it's not my usual sort of thing, but it won me over and I had fun. I understand tho, I've never played a game quite like that myself before. I took my time and had to take many breaks when I was playing. it got overwhelming many times.
ehehe, yes, I love moon. a game that really stuck to me and that I think about regularly. I preordered the physical release from Limited Run games. couldn't miss it.
ehehe, yes, I love moon. a game that really stuck to me and that I think about regularly. I preordered the physical release from Limited Run games. couldn't miss it.
Erato_Heti
1 year ago