Tangle Tower

Sequel to Detective Grimoire, this is a step up in multiple ways. While the first was good (and short), this is also good, and longer, but without added complexity. In fact, it actually simplifies things from the first game. The puzzles are far better than the first. Keep in mind some puzzles aren't always meant to be solved right away. Both are satisfactory games. I look forward to the third, which I haven't yet played.

全成就！ 对人设特别满意！尤其是Poppy对每个人的描述，全程在押韵，是我整个游戏唯一没有跳过语音的片段，语言上的优美对我具有极致的吸引力。另外很喜欢这种全对白的做法，以及人物抖动的特效。Fitz的眼睛高亮也很有趣，刚开始对话完成后还点了好几次玩了玩（x）。从各方面来讲，都是很能激发我去补全系列作品的热情，毕竟系列的特色已经完全在我的脑中留下印象，这一点太优秀了。 唯一不太好的就是结局不是很完整，引出了许多新概念，还牵扯到了孤岛之外的其它事情，但是剧情还是偏小巧，除了关键线索的隐匿外，几乎都没有用上，或许这些新概念的解读，要结合之后的剧情再看了。

绝对的艺术品啊 实在美味！

[4/5] ★★★★☆ Would recommend Tangle Tower on sale ($12 or less). Very fun, lighthearted murder mystery game. The character design, animation, and voice acting is amazing and brings the game to life. The puzzles are trivial to solve (outside of one or two easily missable things), as the main focus is on the fun conversations when interrogating characters, and the grander mystery of what happened. That being said, the ending is very abrupt, and bad, definitely brings down my opinion of the game.

[b]This game was primarily played on Steam Deck offline, so the hours played do not reflect the time displayed. I completed this game fully before writing this review, and got most of the achievements.[/b] [hr][/hr] This is maybe the most like, 5/10 game I've ever played in this genre. It would be a 7 or even an 8, but it really disappointed me in the end. Now, there's a lot I could praise here. The art is quite nice, the characters and setting are memorable, the voice acting is great, and the titular Tangle Tower has a lot of secrets to explore and uncover within its halls. This is a point-and-click murder mystery game, which comes with all the trappings of the genre you could expect. Collect evidence and testimony from the colorful cast, solve logic puzzles, inventory puzzles, all sorts of puzzles short of jigsaw puzzles really, and present evidence to corner liars and get the truth out of them. The characters in this game are somewhat interesting because while none of them are really all that engaging in a void, they all have relationships with each other, and they're all hiding [i]something[/i] for you to squeeze out of them. The actual mystery, at least most of it, is also fairly well done. There's lots of moving parts to the murder, and lots of small pieces of the puzzle that you'll have to slot together into a full picture of the crime. I probably wouldn't really have many complaints about this game at all, but all of this is in service of a conclusion to the mystery that is deeply unsatisfying and impossible to really figure out on your own because of how random of a plot twist it is. You solve the mystery in the sense that you uncover the meat of the crime and how it happened, but you're barely given a chance to digest or think about it because the culprit then randomly reveals themselves which is already bad enough, but there's another fairly stupid plot twist on top of that too that only barely makes sense and is completely unnecessary. You would never be able to guess any part of the actual solution regarding the antagonist, and much of your time spent doing so until the very end of the game is wasted. I'm not entirely against this kind of thing - [i]Disco Elysium[/i] also has a culprit you can't reasonably uncover on your own - but that game isn't explicitly a whodunnit murder mystery and has much more going on. This game actually is a murder mystery, that's the entire point - but it sucks at it. I won't pretend that the likes of [i]Ace Attorney[/i] or similar are always smash hits - the culprits are usually pretty obvious save for the final cases - but at least an obvious culprit gives you an end point to work backwards from. In this case, you're working towards a solution that feels abrupt and awkward. Again, there's a lot to like here. The art's great, puzzles are cool, characters and voices stand out as a high point, but if you're in this for a mystery experience like I was, I don't think you'll be very happy by the end. Hopefully the newly-released sequel is better in this regard.

This jit cracks birds

As an enthusiast of puzzle, point-and-click, and detective games, I cannot wholeheartedly recommend Tangle Tower to anyone who enjoys a twisty, challenging murder mystery to solve. The game is essentially "click on everything and eventually things will unlock." There are "Suspicion" triggers in the game (story beats that help you get a bigger picture about a character's motivations) that happened without me even knowing why. There's no fail state to the game, so you really can just, well, like I said, click on everything until something unlocks. The more "subtle" clues that are somewhat hidden in some clues that make up your inventory are really quite obvious at times, and you can see the answer to an issue yourself for a long stretch of time, but cannot question it until the main characters are ready to ask about it. You have precious little impact on story progression outside of being stuck and stalling the whole thing. But it's really hard to get stuck. And the most unfortunate part is the climax of the tale, which is not only unfulfilling, but extremely frustrating. I will avoid spoilers, but the conclusion stands on an extremely flimsy premise that makes a bit of a 90-degree turn and creates numerous more questions rather than wrapping everything up nicely. "Oh, I guess I got the bad ending then," I told myself. But no, there are no multiple endings. There's just that one ending. The main positive this game has is the characterization and voice acting. Both the main detectives and the NPCs are tremendously well fleshed out and endearing, as you get to know them and their quirks. That's legitimately what kept me into it until the finish. Tangle Tower would have worked best as an animated feature, just sitting back and letting the delightful cast of oddballs guide us to the end of the tale. But as a game, I wish there was some kind of fail state that would keep the pressure up on making correct choices. I wish the mechanics didn't make the solutions blatantly obvious. Red herrings would have been nice (and there was potential for a couple). But it's the terrible ending that really seals the fate for this game. Despite its charm, it cannot outrun its issues.