Tower Princess

I kept coming back to Tower Princess not because the combat felt tight, but because the hook at its center is surprisingly wholesome and a little weird in all the right ways. You pick one of two knight classes, a sword-swinger or a musket-wielding ranger, drop into a procedurally generated castle full of traps and locked doors, and somewhere in those rooms you find a princess or prince to escort out. Each companion is pulled from a different fairy-tale archetype, each with their own gift preferences and a cooldown ability they can contribute to the fight. The Zombie Princess heals; others deal crowd control or raw damage. On paper, that companion layer turns a fairly standard 3D roguelite into something genuinely its own. The mood is the clearest success. The art carries a storybook lightness, torchlight flickers nicely in the castle corridors, and the soundtrack lands on the sweeter side of adventure-game whimsy. The team cites influences ranging from Shrek and Adventure Time all the way back to PS2-era 3D platformers and a quiet reverence for Dark Souls, and that mishmash somehow has a personality. Runs are short, roughly half an hour each, and the pacing rarely drags. For a three-person studio working in Unreal Engine 4, building out procedural dungeons alongside a companion relationship system is a real ambition worth acknowledging. But the gap between concept and delivery is where Tower Princess loses players. The sword knight's combo reach is stubby enough to feel punishing rather than challenging, and the dodge roll has invincibility frames that are, at best, unclear. Enemy attack telegraphing is inconsistent, and some elemental ghost types use their idle animation as their attack animation, so you read a threat that isn't there and miss the one that is. The room variety problem is the bigger long-term issue: the dungeon generator works from a small set of premade layouts, and by the third or fourth run you will walk into rooms you remember exactly, enemies, exits, item placements and all. Two areas and three mandatory bosses per run caps the ceiling quickly. The companion gifting system adds a layer that rewards players who pay attention to each character's preferences, and unlocking their abilities properly does shift the power curve. The difficulty slider means genuinely casual players are not locked out. But the musket class so clearly outperforms the sword knight that the "choose your style" framing feels a little hollow, and the camera requires manual adjustment throughout, which on a 3D platformer with traps is a persistent friction point. Community feedback has been consistent on these points since launch, and post-launch updates have not fundamentally changed the structural limits. If you love the concept of a dating-sim layer folded into a roguelite run, fairy-tale companion archetypes with distinct abilities, and can accept a small indie's rough edges as part of the deal, Tower Princess will hold you for a handful of evenings. Go in expecting Hades and you will be disappointed. Go in expecting a charming, slightly janky small-studio experiment with a lovely OST and a premise nobody else tried quite this way, and it earns its place.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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