Tower of Time

Tower of Time sits in a strange and comfortable middle ground between classic dungeon crawlers and proper tactical RPGs. You descend floor by floor through an ancient tower, assembling a party, managing builds, and fighting through encounters that demand more brainpower than your average hack-and-slash. The combat runs in real time but can be paused or slowed at will, which means the moment-to-moment decisions feel close to what you get in old-school Infinity Engine games without fully committing to a turn-based structure. It works. More than you might expect from a small indie studio. The narrative is where Event Horizon swings harder than most give them credit for. The world has a genuine mythology behind it, the tower itself is a mystery with layered lore that unfolds through environmental storytelling, item descriptions, and NPC dialogue rather than through endless cutscenes. It is not Disco Elysium-level writing, and the character dialogue occasionally dips into functional-but-flat territory, but the overarching story holds together and has a few moments that actually land. If you care about why you are descending a magic tower rather than just how, the game at least gives you real answers. The build system is the mechanical core and it respects your time in the best way. Each of the seven playable heroes has a distinct skill tree, and party composition genuinely shifts how you approach combat. Bringing a Guardian as a frontline anchor while a Battlemage lobs area spells from the back row plays completely differently from a ranged-heavy setup, and the game has enough enemy variety to punish lazy or redundant compositions. The RPGlite mode strips progression down for players who want faster runs, and a Permadeath option is there if you enjoy controlled suffering. Neither feels tacked on. What holds Tower of Time back is pacing. The middle floors stretch longer than they should, and a handful of combat encounters start to feel like the game is running out of new ideas and compensating with volume instead of variety. There are fetch-adjacent quests that exist mostly to pad time between the story beats that actually matter. For a game about descending a mysterious tower floor by floor, the sense of momentum occasionally stalls when it should be tightening. Players who burn out on repetitive dungeon loops before reaching the narrative payoff will leave with an incomplete picture of what the game is actually doing. At 83% positive across a meaningful review count and a Metacritic in the high-70s, Tower of Time lands where it should: a genuinely solid dungeon-crawling RPG that overachieves on tactical depth and worldbuilding for its budget, stumbles on pacing, and deserves more attention than its modest profile suggests. If you have finished every Pillars of Eternity game and want something that scratches a similar combat itch without requiring 80 hours of commitment, this is a reasonable next stop. Monika, Scout Team