Tangle Tower
A puzzle filled mansion filled with troubled souls, and a girl is murdered. Can you solve the case?
SFB Games, $20 on Steam, itch.io, Apple Arcade, and Nintendo Switch, ESRB Rating T (Blood and Violence) Release date: 9/19/19, reviewed on 12/3/2020 by Ryan Soldati
A puzzle filled mansion filled with troubled souls, and a girl is murdered. Can you solve the case? While this isn’t one of my favorite games, it effectively took six hours of my life to finish, with no complaints.
The sequel to the studio’s 2014 title Detective Grimoire, follows the titular detective and his partner Sally as they find the killer of Freya Fellow, a late teen seemingly murdered by a painting.
Tangle Tower follows the gameplay formula of a successful adventure game to a perfectly-crossed T. Examine your environment, get feedback from the player character, solve puzzles, and use items to further your investigation. Outside of that core gameplay loop, the only particularly unique element are the detective segments, where the game presents the player with a string of clues and has to string them together with prompts to establish facts about the case and characters. There is nothing revolutionary about Tangle Tower’s gameplay. And there doesn’t need to be.
Visually Tangle Tower has a lot to offer. Each location is fully fleshed out, giving the player a lot to take in as they scan the environment for clues. The character designs are a stand out feature; everyone has an immediately recognizable silhouette that fully expresses their personality. Not only are the designs themselves memorable, every drawn character has animation during their dialogue sequences. These animations are a subtle detail that adds a layer of depth that simple character portraits can not provide.
Adventure games live and die by their dialogue, and Tangle Tower delivers. Each of the game’s characters has their own unique voice, both figuratively in the written dialogue and literally, as every character has full voice acting. Right from the start the audience immediately gets a sense of Grimoire’s goofy sensibilities and Sally’s nature as his sarcastic foil. In a game so heavily defined by its text, hearing every character actually speak out their lines is a delight.
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Tangle Tower has a level of polish and detail that will satisfy most players. Asking every character about every other character, and seeing their reactions to every clue the player can acquire can end up as a nice time sink. Clicking on different environmental elements provides enough unique reactions to satisfy the drive to exhaust every detail in a game world. Tangle Tower does face the pitfall a lot of other games in the genre face where dialogue will not change to reflect information the player learns. For example, after learning who a certain character in a photograph really is, the player characters will still act as if they don’t know who it is when showing the photo to other characters. Ultimately however, this is a minor detail that does not detract from the experience.
Tangle Tower is a solidly crafted experience that, while not necessarily breaking new ground, is an excellent addition to its genre and well worth the price of admission.
Ratings Rubric
Creativity/Uniqueness: 3/5
Gameplay: 4.5/5
Story/Dialogue: 4.5/5
Visuals: 5/5
Sound: 5/5 (voice acting!)
Polish: 4.5/5
Recommend?: Yes
Ryan Soldati is student at TCNJ who enjoys video games.
