Twisted Tower
Review
A Creepy Carnival Shoot-Em-Up
by Quinn Levandoski
reviewed on PC
Welcome to the Twisted Tower
Twisted Tower isn't one for preamble. The game starts with a quick opening cinematic showing the player-character-to-be, Vincent, proposing to Charlotte at the end of the movie Twisted Tower. Flash forward to the next day, and he's lying on a couch at home where he gets a creepy phone call and hears a woman - Charlotte - scream. Then, boom: the player arrives by boat at "The United Kingdom's World Famous" Mr. Twister's Resort, a dark, spooky tower on an island styled just like the one from the movie players saw Vincent and Charlotte watching moments earlier. The whole introduction is just a minute or two long, and before you'll know it, you'll start blasting.
From there, the game gets started in earnest, and the general concept is straightforward enough. Vincent needs to navigate through the various sections of the horror-filled Twisted Tower complex - built and maintained by the psychotic director and star of the Twisted Tower movie - to reach the top and reunite with his beloved Charlotte. Along the way, he'll use an arsenal of weapons to fight off evil clowns, murderous mascots, decaying murmades, and more. It's a cool concept, but is it fun? Ehh...
Identity Crisis
There are a lot of potentially interesting plot hooks that just don't really pay off - sometimes not at all, and sometimes just not very well. The whole reason that Vincent is brought to the island, and why he's the subject of Twister's torment, is indeed resolved, and while I didn't predict the exact details, the broad strokes are pretty telegraphed. Which isn't inherently a bad thing. We also get some details on Twister that make sense, like his mental state deteriorating as his professional reputation slips from repeated box-office bombs, but there are also details like him having cancer that just don't pay off in any tangible way.
There's also some potentially interesting backstory filled in for Vincent via audio recordings and letters centred on Vincent's aging and cruel mother and his sister, the latter of which he cares for and is suffering from increasingly severe schizophrenia. Emphasis is made of his mother's nickname for him - Goldfish, because of his terrible memory - which is mockingly repeated by his nephew. This seemed like a set-up for a twist, but it just doesn't go anywhere.
On top of it all, Vincent himself just doesn't have much going for him. There's a good amount of backstory tied to his struggles with medical school and to take care of his ailing sister. What his mother would prefer he do instead of medical school ties into some of the narrative, but the whole medical school thing doesn't. And look, all of this isn't inherently an issue. Protagonists don't need to be deep, but when the game takes time to present its characters' stories, it signals intent to deliver some level of depth or purpose. That just doesn't happen.
Twisted Tower feels like it needed to pick a lane and commit to it more. On one hand, it could have leaned a bit more into arena-style arcade shooting, adding more depth to weapons and combat, upping replayability with challenges, and pulling back on the narrative bits that slow things down. On the other hand, we could have seen the story and characters fleshed out a little bit more and integrated into gameplay, turning this into a narrative-driven experience. As it stands, it's really neither. The game doesn't really succeed in its story, but it's also not built to be terribly replayable.
Combat and Weapons
My long-winded criticisms of the game's intent and story, however, are largely secondary to how the game actually feels. There are still issues here, but it's more of a mixed bag than a problem. As Vincent navigates the themed areas of the island, he'll encounter a mix of light environmental puzzles, individual enemies, and larger areas with bigger fights. It's all very fine - the enemies can be a bit creepy the first time you see them, and they have unique silhouettes and always carry the same weapons to help you distinguish what they'll do and how to handle them when things get chaotic. The environmental puzzles are easy and straightforward, but they work.
Gunplay, however, feels very basic, and moving and shooting never feel particularly exciting. This is mostly because the guns, while varied, largely fail to excite. To start, they have a bit too much crossover. There's a tommy gun, and there’' a machine gun that serves a very similar purpose. There's a pump-action shotgun and a double-barreled shotgun. There's a high-accuracy, long-range, slow-firing pistol, and there's a slightly longer range, high-damage, slow-shooting slingshot. Use the shotguns when navigating tight halls, use the machine guns when at middling range, and use one of the long-range weapons when relevant. Shoot the rocket-launcher style weapon at big tanky things.
The number of guns could have been trimmed down, and a little more attention could have gone into their upgrades. Each one has several that can be purchased, but they're surprisingly dull. A few have alternate fire modes (though I never found any but the homing rockets to be very useful), but otherwise it's just straightforward increases to damage and clip size, or decreases to reload time. These are whimsically-themed guns that play with amusement park concepts (like a marble-shooting pistol or a gumball machine gun), and I think the game could have had some more fun exploring that and opening up combat given the extremely stylized presentation of everything else (there are floating fairy godmothers putting force fields on decaying Donald Ducks with shotguns!)
That said, the bigger battles are fun. When large rooms fill with enemies and force the player to swap weapons on the fly to maximize damage amidst reloads and ammunition shortages, things click well. These are few and far between, which is why I think the game would have benefited from leaning a little more into the fast-paced, arena-style combat it succeeds at when presented to the player.
Twisted Tower is a game with a handful of enticing ideas - both narratively and mechanically - but almost none of them actually end up going anywhere interesting. In a way, the game feels a bit like a trailer for something bigger down the line, a proof of concept that'll be fleshed out with more down the line. However, that just isn't the case, and I ended my time with Twisted Tower not disappointed that I'd played, but instead let down by what I feel should have been better.
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4.0
fun score
Pros
Theme-park horror theme is fun, larger fights are engaging
Cons
A lot of narrative fluff that ends up feeling irrelevant; weapons and combat are largely middling
