Pizza Tower, 2023’s best platformer, is getting a free update where you play as one of the villains with his own music and moveset: ‘Think of it as a sort of New Game+’

Pizza Tower might be the best 2D platformer I’ve played since Hollow Knight, and if you want to restrict that to non-metroidvanias, I gotta go back to 2014’s Shovel Knight for anything this good. A year after launch, developer Tour de Pizza now seems close to adding a long-promised mode where you play as one of the game’s main bosses.

The Noise isn’t Pizza Tower’s big bad, but he gets a lot of screen time and seems to have a more personal rivalry with protagonist Peppino Spaghetti⁠—he’s less Bowser, more Wario. Actually, with Pizza Tower having so much Wario Land DNA, maybe the Noise is Mario? Anyway, you get it. See also pizza chain Dominos’ contemptible former mascot, the Noid. I don’t know why a company that large needed to do a lazy knockoff of an indie developer’s character for its mascot, but maybe it should focus on putting out more appetizing pies instead.