Game Theory: Sauce, Cheese, REVENGE! (Pizza Tower)

Pizza Tower At first glance, this

game

appears to have relatively little story. We show cutscenes at the beginning of the

game

that pretty much tell us everything we need to know. It's the story of a man running around trying to save a struggling restaurant. of an evil floating

pizza

that threatens to destroy his business with a laser, it's a weak plot that simply serves as an excuse to start the action, but no friends, this game is much deeper than what the developers have hidden in the background. Quite a story here, a story of betrayal from the Cloning War and if you follow its clues you will see that our heroic chef may have been the real villain from the beginning.

Hello Internet, welcome to game

theory

. Better evidence. Better theories. Games

theory

. Wait. You're hungry, loyal theorists, because today we're serving up a slice of the hottest lore, courtesy of Pizza Tower, the intensely viral indie smash hit that dropped back in January. Hey, I might be a little late to the party on this one, huh? If I were the

pizza

delivery guy, this would have to be free now for those who are not up to date during its development. Pizza Tower is a frenetic action platformer in the style of the Wario Land franchise, actually one of the few that Wario likes. that's been cropping up in recent years, like Anton Blast and Treasure Tech Land, basically the game's developer, mcpig, saw that Nintendo hadn't made a new Wario Land in over a decade and said, "Okay, I'll do it." "Myself, terrible absolute rubbish anyway." After years and a lot of Patreon support, the game is here and the response has been overwhelmingly positive: Pizza Tower became one of the highest-rated Steam games of the year, just hours after its release, people immediately fell in love of his incredibly fast game.

Ren and Stimpy's art style is absolutely absurd for these characters in their world, and of course, like any good indie game, there's a ton of hidden lore in the Secret Sauce story that's very easy to overlook when viewing. The vast majority of the game makes you run. through levels at absolute top speed, but let me tell you, not only is there a story here when you stop and pay attention to it, it actually changes everything players have assumed about this game, our main character, Cucumber, is Much more than just a hapless pizzeria owner trying to save a struggling restaurant.

He is a man who brought all of this on himself and our actions throughout the game are simply perpetuating an ongoing cycle of abuse and violence. That's right, it's classic game theory. Theory that the hero may have been the villain all along, is everyone ready to get funky? Let's get started for those of you who haven't played Pizza Tower yet, here's the basic plot as you lament over your failed Pizzeria papino spaghetti, yes that's its real name, you get a visit from pizzaface, a sentient floating pizza. who threatens to destroy cucumbers with a laser cannon, so to save his business, the naturally anxious Cucumber goes into a rage and runs over anyone who gets in his way while grilling pizza facing the top of the Pizza Tower. headline.

Cucumber runs at maximum speed and climbs walls. like Spider-Man with caffeine and wipes the ever-loving snot out of any sensitive food that crosses his path, rest in peace there, snotty at the end of each stage, Cucumber knocks down the John pillar, a slab of living stone whose face of pizza is cloned. repeatedly and then placed in each level to keep the

tower

portals open permanently, knocking it down triggers a Wario Land 4-style countdown sequence or a Metroid-style final escape where Cucumber must return to the beginning of the level as quickly as possible before. The pizza face grabs you as you climb the

tower

, passing dozens of wacky locations like a pig town, a farm under siege by aliens, a literal war zone, and an abandoned pizzeria haunted by creepy animatronics, oh come on, get out, I can not can.

Is there no rest, God? If Cucumber makes it to the top, he'll finally be able to confront Pizza Face, who is revealed to not actually be a floating pizza monster, but rather some sort of Mech secretly piloted by none other than Pizza Head, a guy with a pizza to boot. head on, this game's name inventions are pretty self explanatory, anyway, it's a strange reveal because this is a character who never previously appeared in the game and was never explicitly alluded to as such at first glance, he appears to be a Twist villain just for the sake of having a Twist villain and honestly I would be totally fine with this being a joke game where nothing is taken too seriously so replacing our floating pizza head with a real pizza boy It's the kind of ridiculous twist that would make a It makes a lot of sense here, but we're being theoretical when we see a surprise final boss appear without any clear setup.

That's the kind of thing that sets off all sorts of alarm bells if you stop and take a closer look at our real final boss. Here everything about pizza. The head is quite strange for the big boss of the game. He never seems to take the final fight seriously. He starts the fight by handing Pepino a gun. He accidentally takes a dirty photo of himself. He fires a machine gun at his own face instead of her. Pepino laughs the whole time it's almost like he's not trying to kill Pepino at all just mess with him if you wanted to kill Pepino he could have fired the laser at Pepino's Pizza without warning instead of giving him a chance to stop him. except the laser is nowhere to be found when Cucumber reaches the top of the tower nor can I find it on any other level, the only explanation is that there was never a laser in the first place and this was all a trick.

Laura Pepino to the tower for a greater purpose, but why understand that we actually have to play the game again? See, once you know to keep an eye out for the pizza head, the signs are there from the beginning of the game, literally, the first enemy you face in the tutorial is a cardboard cutout of the pizza man, a boy with exactly the same face as Pizza Head. He looks at the rosy cheeks, the big red nose, and of course the big slice of pizza, like a suspicious looking face. That pizza boy could simply be an adult version of the pizza boy we see later in the FNAF level.

That pizza guy is the main mascot of pizza guy piss pizza and that's not the only place he appears. World 4, the poor neighborhood has a pizza. Cutout of boy crowded into a sewer pipe, this leads to multiple cutouts that we can find littering in the sewers throughout the level, as if all this pizza guy merchandise is suddenly discarded all at once later in the game, when you visit the city of pigs, you can see searched. posters at the beginning of the level as well as at the beginning of the Watchers boss light, Pepino is a wanted man with a million dollar bounty on his head, like John Wick bounty levels looming over him, What did he do later in the city of pigs? level Pepino is arrested and what do we find waiting for us in the cell?

Here's another cutout pizza guy waiting there acting almost like a calling card. Is he the one behind all this? Could it be that he is the one who introduces the wanted ones? posters and when Pig City finally burns down, you can see the graffiti of the Pizza Boys' smiling face looming between the buildings as if he was enjoying all this destruction, finally, at the end of the game, Justice Pepino and his friends are about to reach the exit. From the crumbling Tower, a horde of pizza cutouts appear in a last-ditch effort to slow them down. The boy is always there, he's always watching, he's always impeding Cucumber's progress, he even reacts to how well you're doing in the game when you first start the game.

A pizza face is used to measure your current completion percentage. He starts out happy when you're at zero percent, but he starts to get sad when he sees that you've slowly progressed, getting angrier and angrier and quickly loses all resemblance to the pizza guy and instead gains the appearance of pizza head if the pizza guy was a different entity it wouldn't make sense for him to get angry about Cucumber's success, but if he really is the pizza boss then of course he gets angry because you're getting closer to frustrating his plan, which then begs the question of what the plot is.

All of these clues seem to suggest that Pizza Head was once the mascot and potential owner of Pizza Boy Piz Pizza, but we still don't know what problem he has with Pepino, if he's just going after a competing Pizza Chef, why target someone whose business that's it? Well, in the tank, Pizza Head doesn't have any dialogue in the game to tell us his motives. There is an NPC that makes pizza. Grandmother. She's like Pizza Face. She is a pizza. She has a face. She appears in the hub world. before each level to tell you things like how to use your taunt to parry projectiles or how unfortunate your name is spaghetti cucumber usually her dialogue is short and to the point she's basically there as a tutorial but in an encounter in the Western District she suddenly goes out in this huge RAM, the syntax is completely wrong and it's hard to parse what exactly it's trying to say, but one nugget of information stands out among all the others.

Appointment at the top of the tower, there is a character with a pizza face and then there is a man. from your previous life leading the way, since Pizza Head is the only one up there, it's not hard to figure out that he is the man from Pepino's past, but again I asked what is his real backstory here, why Pizza Head seeks

revenge

? Well, everything comes back as it usually does with FNAF, specifically the FNAF level that I keep mentioning, don't make a sound, it's the penultimate level of the game, which already puts it in an important position, but what's really interesting about this one is all .

With story clues scattered throughout the various background environments, the first thing that catches your eye is the sign clearly stating that Pizza Piss Pizza is going out of business, which could explain why all of Pizza Boy's cutbacks were thrown into sewers all over the slum map, so we know. As it is a fact that the Pizzahead's restaurant was going through difficult times, we can also see in the pizzeria's warehouse that the corpse of a safety inspector hangs from the ceiling trapped by one of the many dangerous toys that are hidden in boxes that could be a good Which is why the restaurant fell on such tough financial times, nothing says sagging profits like having a series of murders in your back rooms, doesn't it, Willie, but it's the series of signs here that I really want to examine? one shows us that the third boss of the game, Noise used to be a pizza mascot of his.

Now, for some context, the noise here is a parody of Domino's mascot, the Noid, a character known for being one of the worst restaurant mascots ever. In fact, we recently did a food theory about him and how he single-handedly caused a hostage situation in a restaurant, so if you haven't seen that video or aren't familiar with the character, check it out when you're done. here, but based on the photos we see in the level, the noise was a key part of his pizza's marketing strategy and apparently he wasn't the only one here on some of the other posters, you can see a stretchy

cheese

slime character , now

cheese

.

Slimes are a common enemy throughout the game, so this might be a stretch, do it because it's cheese, but I don't think there's just any character. I suspect that slime, like the noise, is also a boss in the game. tower specifically the boss of Floor 2 the Watcher as proof look at the eyes notice the pupils of a normal cheese slime versus the Watcher's pupils the Watcher has pricked pupils unlike the common enemies who have more oblong pupils now look at the Slime that is uses in this poster, poked eyes, eyes that match the Watcher, so we have the second floor boss as a former brand mascot, the third floor boss is a former brand mascot, and the final floor boss , Pizza head, is the pizza guy. the main face of the company, I don't know about you, but I'm noticing a pattern here and that pattern only continues as we look at more details in the levels that you see as we go through the remains of your pizza, there are other familiar ones. faces that begin to appear, for example, a friend of Pino's Chef, Gustavo, appears here several times, first as a puppet of Gustavo guiding us forward, but also as a character in an arcade machine.

Pizza Crawler, why would it be here of all places? Why would there be merch and spins? -off titles dedicated to him unless he also worked on his pizza at some point, but even more suspicious, Pepino himself used to work on piz Pizza as a mascot throughout the level, we see several arcade cabinets starring Pepino Pizza Tower Defense Pizza Tower Golf, but if there is any doubt that there is a sign hidden just out of sight showing Cucumber chasing the pizza. Noise and noise of the Gremlins. In other words,Cucumber also used to be a piss pizza mascot.

Each of these characters used to be part of the piz Pizza brand, they were all mascots or marketing characters or involved in the business in some way, they all have a shared history with pizza head as the literal and figurative head of it all, but it seems that At some point Pepino broke away from the others to do his own pizza business. I suspect that somehow that decision killed his pizza, which is why we see the company going bankrupt. Why do I think like this? In one of the other posters we see Pashino, the Italian chef, an animatronic character that looks exactly like that. as Cucumber and not only does he look like Cucumber, if one of the monsters in this level scares you you will respawn as Pacino which shows you that you and pashino are destined to be one and the same thing, I think this was Piz Pizza trying to find a replacement for Pepino when Pepino left to go it alone, leaving all the other characters high and dry, they were suddenly left with one of their star characters missing in a desperate attempt.

To replace him they tried puppets, robotics and marionettes, but none of them worked and that was when they began to get very desperate, they began to clone Pepino. You see, once you get to the fourth floor boss, things in the game get really weird if your theoretical alarms were active. Not triggered by anything else in this game, Floor 4 should be numb on high alert. It is here where we fight Pepino himself, yes, we are fighting against ourselves or, more accurately, against a cloned and twisted version of ourselves, he is taller, his eyes bulge out and, oh yes, there is also, literally, dozens of them attack at once, they'll even throw their heads at us when things get desperate, but why is there a clone of our character running around?

Well, we actually see the laboratory where these clones are made in the final level. game titled simply war in this level you literally fight your way through a war-torn landscape with fighter jets and bombs in the air, it's so strange that it led fans to come up with their own game theories focused mainly on the idea that Pepino is actually a war veteran, now Mcpig, the creator of the game came out and debunked that theory on Discord, but then they also made some tweets that would imply that the theories could be true, so it seems like that's all up. in debate.

Although it's neither here nor there that I want to focus on, it's the background of some of the screens in this level where we see copies of Cucumber floating in stasis tubes, what does that mean? It means he's being cloned, but does that mean he's being cloned? why?, the clue is. that they gave us during the fight with the boss of the fourth floor, look at the background and see what it says in the window, Pinos' pizza too and that's not all at the end of the fight, there is an extended horror chase sequence, If you manage to survive, you emerge. to the other side and suddenly they are standing in front of an old defunct building called Bruno Pizza.

They are renaming failed abandoned pizzerias as cucumbers. He's the boss of Pizza trying to make his own Cucumber franchise. They're creating clones of Pepino to steal his business, not because he's particularly successful or anything, but as payment for Pepino's betrayal when he left the Pizza family for the first time, so taking all these clues together. Here is the final story that I have pieced together based on the clues hidden in the game, his pizza was a highly successful company that periodically released new mascots for marketing purposes to generate buzz, noisette noisette Gustavo, cheese slimes, but in At the top of the pile was the pizza guy, the literal face of the company, the Pizza Tower is his family's home, as evidenced by the portraits hanging in the game's opening hallway, but of all of them there was one mascot that would rise. to challenge the popularity of pizza boy Pepino, a chef character who would be mocked and trolled by the rowdy twins and harassed by every man who did something pretty damned. good pizza when it was first introduced, its popularity took off and piz Pizza took it everywhere, including multiple spin-off arcade games, but eventually Pepino wanted to move on and do it on his own, it was popular enough to become his own solo act.

Pizzahead, a former child actor, was the ultimate betrayal, they were family, they don't just leave the family desperate to replace him. Pizza head and the rest of the team created Pashino, an animatronic version of Cucumber didn't work, his pizza started having problems in the meantime. Pepino was doing well, not very well, but he was earning enough to survive. His pizza still attracted a lot of customers, it was his biggest competition, so Pepino decided to play a little dirty, you see, because of the time he spent working. The Pepino company had one last ace up its sleeve, it knew the dangerous secrets hidden behind its pizza, the failed and deadly products that the pizza had tried to sweep under the rug, so Pepino called an emergency inspection of health and safety in the restaurant. hoping to shut down his competition once and for all, then his pizza company would be the last one standing, he could finally prosper if he betrayed his former coworkers, but this was a business after all, the thing is that this plan worked.

In fact, it worked too well. The health inspector came, got caught in one of the dangerous toys in the back room and died. The spread of death that had occurred at Piz Pizza, this resulted in the business quickly going bankrupt, leaving all these characters like the noise, the Noisette Watcher, all of them with nowhere to go except staying inside the Tower of the Pizzahead family, up to some sort. of

revenge

against the man who had abandoned them and then sabotaged them. The Piz Pizza team came up with wilder and Wilder stories until they finally landed on cloning.

They created dozens of alternative cucumbers. It was no longer about recovering the business. It was about revenge. It was about taking their business along with them this was a war, mutually assured destruction, they would put the Clones in poor quality copycat pizzerias in low income areas of the neighborhood to damage the Pepino brand and it works for the original Pino restaurant was crushed by debt and so there they were all miserably destroyed together, which meant it was the perfect time for Pizzahead to pay Pepino a visit to Laura Pepino back at the Tower and gather the Piz Pizza family once again to force to Pepino to face all these moments, these places, these characters from his past and that is where the real story of Pizza Tower begins and where our story ends today now, if you excuse me, I will go eat a salad, but well, that it's just a theory, a game theory, thanks for watching and hey, if you want to learn more about the dark history of Domino's Noid, that video is on the left, be sure to get a Munch from that button you see on the screen right now or, if all this pizza talk is making you a little thirsty, grab a drink. the video on the right where we discuss the disturbing story from only cameras, as always my friends, I will see you next week.