Twisted Tower

One rule shapes everything here: you only ever go up, and it rewired how I play a shooter inside of twenty minutes. Each floor of this rotted-out 1950s park is its own themed attraction, and the tower keeps shoving you forward into the next one instead of letting you circle back, so a fight gets solved with whatever you walked in holding. That sounds like a minor structural choice. It is not. It strips out the reflex of backing into a cleared hallway to reset an encounter on your terms, and it turns the building into a pressure gauge rather than a map. Somewhere around the fourth floor I stopped creeping and started moving forward on purpose, which I suspect is the whole point. What you are actually holding is a first-person action game with an adventure spine, carrying the fingerprints of a publisher that has been chasing a particular 1990s feeling for decades. Atmos Games is not doing pure nostalgia cosplay with it, though. Movement is quick and readable, enemies telegraph clearly enough that crowded rooms stay legible, and the shooting has a dry percussive snap that sells every hit. What surprised me is how much of the runtime is not shooting at all. Floors are laced with puzzles and traps that ask you to read the room, literally: attraction signage, ride machinery, the placement of a mascot that is looking at something it should not be looking at. The best rooms are the ones where the answer was painted on the wall the entire time and I walked past it twice. The mood work is where I fell for it. A decayed 1950s park is such an easy setting to overplay, all screaming animatronics and cheap stingers, and this mostly refuses that bait. Instead you get faded primary colors under dying light, cheerful attraction jingles still looping in rooms where nothing has worked in decades, and long stretches of near silence that the sound design holds like a breath. The fairy-tale mascots are unpleasant the way the original versions of those stories are unpleasant: too many teeth, too much smiling, a costume logic that stopped making sense a long time ago. It sits closer to unease than horror, and it keeps that register for the entire climb instead of escalating into noise. The story is the part I would set expectations around. You are ascending to win back the person you love while uncovering what you did to lose them, and it arrives in fragments: environmental detail, staging, the way an attraction quietly restages a memory you would rather not revisit. If you want that handed to you cleanly, it will frustrate you. If you enjoy assembling a person out of the debris they left behind, it lands hard in the back half. The opening is slower than the premise suggests, and I will defend that pacing, because the park has to feel abandoned and lonely before any of the mascots mean anything. Give it the first hour before you judge it. Where it disappoints: the one-way structure that makes the climb work also means there is very little to come back to. This is a single-player run with no modes hiding behind it, so replay value amounts to the achievement list and your own curiosity about rooms you rushed. The puzzle-to-combat rhythm stumbles occasionally, usually when a trap sequence demands a precision the movement is not quite built for, and I ate a handful of deaths that felt like the room's fault rather than mine. A few of the later floors also reach for spectacle in a way that thins the quieter dread the early ones built so patiently. None of that undoes the craft. A small team made something coherent and hand-shaped, and knew exactly when to stop climbing, which is rarer than it should be. The near-unanimous player response it launched into is not an accident.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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