2023's third highest-rated Steam game is a Wario Land-inspired pizza platformer

Developer Tour De Pizza clearly didn't compromise on its passions when it released its debut title: a pizza-themed platformer inspired by the Wario Land series, and the studio's dedication to its dreams appears to have paid off.

If you head to Steam's page for its most popular games released in 2023, you'll see a colorful little platformer called Pizza Tower at number three. The game prominently bills itself as "a fast paced 2D platformer inspired by the Wario Land series," and you can see that inspiration pretty clearly in the gameplay trailer:

Pizza Tower puts you in the shoes of the plump pizzaiolo Peppino Spaghetti, whose restaurant is under threat from the diabolical Pizza Face - literally a giant pizza with a face - who plans on annihilating Peppino's restaurant from the titular tower. Now, Peppino's a big fan of his restaurant, and likely his livelihood, so he's pretty motivated in getting to the top of Pizza Tower and putting a stop to Pizza Face once and for all. 

Naturally, in his way are all manner of, in Tour De Pizza's words, "monsters and other weirdos." From the promotional materials, you can clearly see Peppino barreling right through obstacles like blocks of cheese and giant potatoes, and on the way to fight bosses, collecting pizza ingredients like tomatoes and mushrooms.

Pizza Tower has been in the making for about five years, so it's good to see its grand opening is getting business on Steam. Not only is it being played a lot, but it's also getting stellar reviews from players and critics alike. At the time of writing, Pizza Tower has almost 1,000 'Overwhelmingly Positive' reviews on Steam and our colleagues over at PC Gamer awarded it an impressive 9/10.

Looking ahead, here are all of the upcoming indie games we have on our radar for 2023.