Dabbling With… The Twisted Tower

The ninth episode of a short series on games I discovered at EGX Rezzed 2019.

Pocket Money Games were stationed near an entrance to the Indie Room at Rezzed. They had four titles out.

I tried a couple of the more casual ones, SPD and The Twisted Tower. SPD was a Temple Run type of experience and I’ve never loved that genre too much but The Twisted Tower, however, had that just-one-more-go hook that good casual games tend to have.

What I saw of it was straightforward. Witch must avoid baddies and collect all gems. The game arena is effectively 2D but there’s a 3D aspect to it: it is a set inside a tall cylindrical mansion and the balconies are all rotating in different directions and at different speeds. And if you encounter a beastie just once, then your little witch is toast and it’s time to start over. I got through three levels I think before I decided to call it a day; you don’t want to hog the seat for too long unlike those people who insisted on playing through the entire demo of My Friend Pedro.

It felt like all the parts of The Twisted Tower clicked nicely into place. The spinning balconies create this tension where you do not know if you’re going to run into a monster, or if a monster is about to drop over a ledge that you want to jump up onto – especially as you’re having to make split-second decisions. It felt a little bit like a lost arcade game and it deserves an attract mode. It’s quite possible this is a riff off another title that I’m unfamiliar with – let me know if this rings any bells.

The curious thing is there’s no information out there about The Twisted Tower. Pocket Money Games tells me it is out on PC, Switch and Playstation later this year – so hopefully more information will be inbound then.

Right now, your best source of news is the Pocket Money Games website and their Twitter account.

Interested in other games I’ve dabbled with? Check out the series index!