Twisted Tower Review (PC)

They (generally speaking) don't make them like Twisted Tower anymore. Games during the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 era had a distinct look and feel to them. Glossy, shiny, wet, often pointlessly crude and mildly edgy in a smirk-raising, corporate-safe kinda way. After playing through silly-spooky FPS Twisted Tower (thanks to Atmos Games and lead developer Thomas Brush for the early key) over the weekend, I'm comfortable saying that I kinda missed this absurd, corrnball era of gaming, and that it's great to see a small studio (with only a handful of core developers) able to do now what AAA studios would be expected to do back circa 2007-2008.

Twisted Tower is billed as a horror FPS, although you're unlikely to be particularly scared here unless you find yourself chilled by the thought of picking up an R.L. Stine book. This is a Goosebumps-ass game. This is a Spirit Halloween-core game. This is an FPS wearing an off-the-shelf Party Warehouse costume and doused in slightly-too-watery thin fake blood. And that's fine, because this isn't a game trying to be particularly scary, even when you're being pursued by a swarm of giant spiders. It's a good-looking game for sure (by indie standards), and the evil theme park aesthetic works well, but if it was ever trying to use those visuals to unsettle or unnerve, it didn't manage it. It did crack a few smiles, though.

This is a high-speed, linear FPS through a surreal, nonsensical theme park supposedly based on the works of one Mr. Twister, a one-time cinema heartthrob turned B-movie laughing stock and bizarre recluse. Twister has apparently gotten bored with his self-imposed exile as he's gone and kidnapped Vincent and Charlotte, a wholesome young couple. Vincent (our wisecracking protagonist) has been assigned the role of dashing hero, and Charlotte as damsel in distress. Lights, camera, action. Bring on the silly mascots. So, so many mascots.

While not a truly 'retro' FPS with big enemy swarms, this is a fast-paced game, slowly amping up the mobility over the course of the story and expecting you to keep on the move to avoid (mercifully non-hitscan) gunfire. Each zone of the titular Twisted Tower presents you with a new mobility upgrade. First a grappling hook that lets you zip around some arenas, then a high-speed air-dash, a double-jump and so on, slowly ramping up the speed of the combat as the game goes on. Mobility is mostly about evading damage, as there's no instant healing items, just collectible snacks. Each one heals about a third of your maximum health at a key-press, and you can carry ten, giving plenty of opportunity for mistakes and recovery, with the game seemingly doling out extra healing and ammo as drops from enemies if you're particularly low.

Despite feeling like it belongs in the PS360 era, Twisted Tower has the spirit of an earlier generation of shooter, back when heroes carried ten different guns (many with alt-fire modes), more ammo than is ever reasonable and then supplemented it with permanent powerups. Aside from the early-game weapons (a mallet, a rubber-band pistol and a dart-firing tommy gun) losing their usefulness in the late game, they're a fun and consistently useful bunch of weapons, themed like goofy kid's toys. The minigun fires gumballs from a glass hopper on top, the magnum launches marbles from pinball flippers (and rewards headshots with extra prize tickets to unlock more upgrades) and the sniper rifle is a slingshot with a big magnifying glass scope, and while I found my ammo capacity for any one is never really deep enough to play favorites, switching frequently felt more than enough to suppress all threats on Normal difficulty.

The enemies are equally silly. Mostly people in big-headed park mascot costumes; ducks with shotguns, giraffes with pistols, fire-breathing seahorses and carnivorous mermaids, often teleporting nonchalantly into the room shortly before being decapitated in a hail of toy gunfire. It doesn't ever feel especially violent, either. Yes, the mascot's heads pop off cartoonishly, but their bodies despawn shortly after, ready to reappear in another room (often two or three at a time). While it feels that on a first playthrough, some enemies only saw a level or two of use before the finale, there's little complaints about the roster, although I did find myself wishing that there were more hand-placed enemies, and fewer arenas that just spawn arbitrary, thinly-distributed waves of fodder.

It seems inevitable that some will draw Bioshock comparisons here, and yes, there's some art-deco similarities, along with a chatty vending machine to cash in your prize tickets on upgrades to weapon damage, reload speed and capacity, but that's about where the similarities end. This is a purely linear high-action FPS, funneling you from one corridor to setpiece to corridor, punctuated with combat and the occasional spike trap to dodge past. The tone is also much sillier, with much of the posters and signage in the park reading like it was written by The Joker after a bottle of absinthe, with toilet humor abound and nudge nudge wink wink references to inappropriate horniness that never quite materializes. It would be eye-rolling, if the rest of the game didn't maintain such a consistently goofy tone.

While I could critique the obvious plot and setting holes here, it would be pointless. The fact that Twisted Tower is set in 1944 but with a casino full of arcade cabinets. The fact that it's set in England and yet everyone uses contemporary American slang. Really, if you look hard at any aspect long enough and try to pull on that thread, it's going to come unraveled. And that's because the game operates entirely on a mixture of cartoon and dream logic, and the tower itself is a nonsensical, impossible space designed purely as a chain of FPS levels. It is a game where you can eventually become a turbo-charged jester avenger, battling evil fairy godmothers and blasting minigun-toting clowns with a 1950s ray-gun, and I think the developers would laugh at me if I thought about it too hard.

Twisted Tower is silly. A game not particularly concerned with making sense, just keeping up that cartoonish, slightly ramshackle energy until the credits roll. And given that I cleared the main story on Normal difficulty in around five hours, it doesn't have to do that for every long. I've yet to dig into the game's promising-sounding New Game Plus mode (starting the player with their full arsenal and sending them through new and tougher areas), but that feels like a good way to squeeze another afternoon's fun out of the game. Things did get a bit rough in the final couple areas, with 90% of my deaths coming from falling off the tower rather than direct enemy damage, and a few areas that looked double-jump-dashable to had invisible walls that dropped me into the abyss, but these moments were few and far between and usually only cost a minute or so's progress.

It does feel that there's some things that got cut. Talk of a 'Twisted Beast' that never materializes. Only one boss-fight (and a pretty good one, at that) at the end, and some segments of the tower feeling slightly truncated, any plot threads cut short in favor of 'and the princess was in another castle, go to the new zone!'. I would hazard a guess that some of those rough edges come from a somewhat tortured development cycle. Early concept art and screenshots of the game portray something significantly more serious, with Vincent looking like a much more hard-edged character, as opposed to his increasingly clownly version in this final iteration - by the time the credits roll, he's wearing clown shoes, fairy wings, a jetpack and wielding a big novelty mallet. But that version of the game doesn't exist, and this one does, and such conjecture is fun as a thought experiment, but not so useful as critique.

The Twisted Tower we got is a budget-priced, short-but-sweet throwback to a particularly goofy era of gaming. A solid B+ performance, if slightly confused in its B-movie narrative ambitions, lost in a haze of slapstick, fart jokes and exploding mascot heads. While Twisted Tower seems unlikely to become anyone's big new FPS obsession, it's good, dumb fun that doesn't overstay its welcome and saves some goodies for after the credits roll. And if it had come out back in 2007-2008, we'd probably be seeing the first round of YouTube video essays about how it as a true hidden gem. They'd be wrong, but I won't hold it against them.

Twisted Tower is out now on Steam for £12/$15, with a 10% launch discount, and some further savings if you own a bunch of popular mascot horror games too.