David Wesst

Tangle Tower is a child-friendly enough detective-style adventure game where you try and solve a murder. We played it as a family in one sitting, which might have been a bit much, but the experience was positive nonetheless. A nice throwback to the LucasArts style of adventure game.

What I Didn't Like

Lack of Aids for Finding Things

Thinking back to the LucasArts adventure game days, pixel hunting was always a chore. You would scroll that cursor around to every inch of the screen trying to figure out what blob of pixels, made out of the 16 colours allowed in the game, was the special button that opened the door you needed. The thing to remember there, is that although it was hard to see on screen, when you did eventually find something there was a visual cue. This cue was usually in the form of text, and say something like "Look at super-secret switch", at which point you would breath a sigh of relief until you had to do it all over again for the next room.

Tangle Tower is a modern game, with a great visual art style, not limited by the number of colours. But they opted to not use any visual indicators to tell you there was something there to find. Instead, you would have to click on it and then listen to the dialogue from the protagonists. If you got a generic line, you knew it wasn't interesting.

This design choice didn't get in our way often, as key items to explore are visually interesting at least. But, we had to go "pixel hunting" throughout the game to find things we didn't know we has missed. This would break our investigative momentum and result it in systematically going through each room and re-exploring it to find something that we were missing.

If there was some kind of cue, visual or otherwise, letting us know there might be something left in a room to find it would have narrowed down the search in these moments.

Paging in the Interrogation UI

When you interrogate a suspect, you can ask them about specific topics by clicking very prominent buttons displayed on the screen. What we didn't realize is that we were actually on a "tab", and there were other tabs of information we could have asked them about.

Maybe it was something we missed at the beginning of the game, but none of us noticed those buttons at the top of the screen until much later in the game. By then we had built up quite the inventory of items to discuss with people and needed to go back to chat with them. Same for talking about the other characters in the game.

I understand that this could easily have been a problem with me-- but it killed the fun for a good hour while we went through all the items and all the characters with all the other characters. It turned into a grind going through a task list rather than an investigation where we were putting clues together.

What I Liked

Child Friendly-ish Content and Gameplay

Between the art style and the content, this game is pretty child friendly for a murder investigation game. You never see bodies or a ton of blood. In fact, it reminded me of the Day of the Tentacle art style, although modernized.

I just appreciated the work they did to make this game, and its subject matter, accessible to kids. It has its spooky moments, and a few comments that went over their heads and made me chuckle-- but all in all, it was a great experience for the kids and the parents.

Beyond the game content itself, I also appreciated the introductory gameplay support to enable people new to the genre. Little things like checking off things you had already discussed with different characters. Highlighting rooms in the map you have not been into yet. These little things helped the kids understand what they needed to do to get the investigation done, and helped the parents remember what we doing as well.

Voice Acting

The voice acting in this game really stood out to me. High quality performances for all the exceptionally unique characters. It really helped set the tone throughout the game and kept all of us immersed, especially the kids.

The Conclusion

This was a solid game. One that both myself and my kids enjoyed playing. Even though we did a single-day playthrough, the kids were still interested and focused on the game throughout the entire run. I think the parents could have used a break to get other things done around the house, but ultimately it was a positive experience and will be looking forward to continuing the adventure with Grimoire and Sally when it arrives.