Pizza Tower may be the best 2D platformer I've played since Hollow Knight. If you limit yourself to non-metroidvanias, you have to go back to 2014's Shovel Knight to find a game as good as this one. A year after its release, developer Tour de Pizza seems to be getting close to adding a long-promised mode in which you play as one of the game's main bosses.

Noise is not the big bad of Pizza Tower, but he does get a lot of screen time and seems to have a personal rivalry with the main character, Peppino Spaghetti. In fact, since Pizza Tower has a lot of Wario Land DNA, perhaps Noise is Mario. See also Noid, the despicable former mascot of pizza chain Dominos. I don't know why a company that large needed to use a hand-picked copy character from an indie developer as its mascot, but they should concentrate on putting out more appetizing pies instead.

Tour de Pizza's gameplay clips of Noise show the same momentum-driven platform play as Peppino. Tour de Pizza describes Noise as "like a new game+."

Given that this new character is operating on the same level as Peppino, he definitely feels more like Peppino than the base game alt characters Gustavo and Brick. It will be interesting to see how he feels, but we can already appreciate his unique animations, UI elements, and the new level escape music used in both the first and second rounds of "Pizza Time."

The alternate playable character seems to be one that Tour de Pizza has experimented with several times during development: the developer featured a playable Noise at the launch of Pizza Tower last January and another boss in the 2020 YouTube teaser, The Vigilante, showing a playable version of Vigilante. The embedded YouTube video has an older WIP of a playable Noise prior to Pizza Tower's release.

Given that the various levels of power-ups allow Peppino to operate like a completely different character, adding multiple alt characters on top of that was probably an impossible task.

No date has been set for the Noise update, but it seems to be pretty close to completion; according to a December Tour de Pizza post, it "won't be ready in time for Christmas," but for me, it should be ready to play as soon as Christmas is over.