Towerfall Ascension

Towerfall Ascension is a local multiplayer combat game built around bows, arrows, and the kind of split-second reads you only develop after losing to your roommate forty times in a row. Four players share a single screen on compact, hand-crafted arenas, and the objective is brutally simple: shoot people, stomp on heads, catch enemy arrows mid-flight, and do not get caught standing still. There are no health bars to chip down. Most hits are instant kills. Matches last seconds or stretch into desperate, arrow-starved stand-offs depending on how good your friends are at hiding in corners. The mechanical vocabulary is tiny on paper. You move, jump, shoot, dodge-roll, and catch. That is almost the whole list. What Maddy Makes Games built on top of that short list is genuinely impressive - a combat system where arrow count matters, where the act of picking up spent bolts off the floor is itself a tactical decision, and where a perfectly timed mid-air catch turns the whole room against you in the best way. Power-up variants like speed arrows, bomb arrows, and drill arrows shuffle the rhythm without overcomplicating it. Arenas rotate and each one has distinct geometry that rewards learning the layout rather than just reacting faster. The pixel artwork here is careful and confident. Torchlit stone corridors, glowing runes, layered background detail - nothing feels slapped together. The soundtrack leans into a slightly ceremonial, drum-and-synth register that makes even a three-second round feel weighty. Ascension also ships with a single-player and co-op Quest mode for when your usual crew is unavailable, which is a serviceable wave-defense romp, though it is clearly a secondary concern. The heart of Towerfall is the versus mode, and if you play it with the right people, it will steal several evenings you had other plans for. The honest caveats: this is a couch game. Online multiplayer is not present in the base PC release, which in a post-pandemic gaming landscape is a genuine limitation. If you are buying this hoping to queue into matches with strangers, you will be disappointed. It also asks you to already have a local group willing to crowd around a monitor - controllers strongly recommended, keyboard splits are possible but awkward. For solo players, the Quest mode offers some replay value with unlockable content and difficulty scaling, but you are buying a party game if you buy this, not a single-player experience. What makes Towerfall worth recommending across the decade-plus since its release is that it understood exactly what it was trying to be and executed it without compromise. No battle pass, no padding, no lobby screens dressed up as features. The arenas are tight, the ruleset is learnable in one match, and the skill ceiling is high enough that a competitive local scene still exists. For the right household, this is one of those games that never fully leaves the hard drive.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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