[b]content warning: human excrement and other gross stuff[/b]
[h1]Intro[/h1]
Before we start the review, I need disclaim 2 things. I got this review copy of The Tower of Wowers early because one of the devs gave it to me for free. I also got the chance to playtest the game in an even earlier non-public build. Ultimately though, I am still a media informatics student in their fourth semester and will thoroughly dissect a game when reviewing it. With that out of the way, let’s begin. (The tldr is at the bottom)
[h1]Technical Details[/h1]
The Tower of Wowers was developed in RPG Maker, which can ring alarm bells for some, but just because you use RPG Maker, doesn’t mean your game is automatically bad. What it does mean is that this game runs on any PC built in the last 10 years.
In my 6 hours of the review process I did not run into a single crash, but there are issues. That is to say, weird or buggy events that don’t kill the game but causes unexpected behavior. The pathfinding when moving with the mouse struggles with the presence of corners and u-turns. There were also some weird interactions with how some things behave during combat. For instance, your items and spells (like a healing potion or spell) can just flat-out miss, meaning you wasted a turn and resources for nothing, which’d be ok if mentioned beforehand but it wasn’t, and as a game dev you should work with the expectations of your players and I think the vast majority of players of any game would expect those actions to [i]always[/i] have the expected effect.
[h1]Gameplay[/h1]
The Tower of Wowers is a basic turn-based JRPG. You start on floor 1 and sequentially fight your way through all 59 of them, with a few resting spots in-between for you to heal up, and the option to save and reload the game.
Over the course of your playthrough you will recruit more characters for your party, which gives you higher damage output and more security against team wipes.
Speaking of party members, I just want to point out that almost everyone you recruit starts at level 1. You’ll be showing up with a party of characters on about level 12 on floor 20, recruit someone new and spend the next several floors worrying about them dying because they’re underleveled. I say “almost” because there is one character that starts at level 20, so the devs seem aware of this issue.
With this leveling system however, we get a conflicting dynamic with the general flow of the game. You’re incentivised to grind on floors to level your characters up and gather loot. The problem with this is that you mostly can’t go back to previous floors to farm for different items or XP again.
The inability to go back to previous floors hinders parts of the JRPG party management of the game and makes it almost feel like a rogue-like, while the party-management system and xp and gear game scream “RPG Maker boilerplate”.
[h1]Combat[/h1]
There is not much to say. The combat is generic, although it makes up a sizeable chunk of gameplay, and the balancing is not there. You can develop tactics, but those go out the window if one side is vastly overleveled, which in my experience is guaranteed to happen.
The one thing that is memorable is the way you get into encounters: It’s a bit like Pokemon but everything is tall grass. You don’t see the enemies and just happen upon them by chance. This can feel pretty frustrating at times, especially with bosses, but you get used to it.
[h1]Worldbuilding Outline[/h1]
You wake up as Hairold in a brightly-lit cave with a bunch of rocks and excrement all over the place. After you investigate, you, the player, will notice that the game is self-aware and keen on breaking the 4th wall in its writing. The universe is a bit all over the place with the basic design philosophy behind the enemies seeming to be “if it’s grotesque, it’s in here”.
[b]Pop quiz:[/b] What’s a Rainbow Barf Person? A person vomiting rainbows? Wrong! It’s a disembodied head, stuck to a rainbow, producing regular throwup. That’s the level this game is on.
Moving on, where this game shines is its artistic expression. The writing is fun, the item descriptions are ridiculous (even if useless at times) and [b]THE GAME KNOWS IT[/b]. It might be filled with toilet humor (which gets a bit too in your face at times tbh), but the enemies are fantastic in their thematic designs. Every floor has its own enemy, here’s a selection: An incarnation of The 90s in a cathedral, a caricature of the obligatory Beach Scene, the Mental Warfrare enemy was like the funniest thing I’ve encountered in ages in a singleplayer game. (Won’t spoil it here)
Still, I would’ve given this game a negative review but it redeemed itself with:
[h1]The End[/h1]
Reading this [b]will[/b] ruin the one unspoiled playthrough you have. I’ll outline the end in general non-spoiler terms in my conclusion.
[spoiler]After you beat all 59 floors, the victory hall has 2 surprises. You unlock the elevator that lets you travel to any floor you want & makes replaying on the same save file fun. But why should you replay the game? Well, because you get to recruit 3 enemies into your party that you previously fought who all are, as you might have guessed, aware that they are enemies in a video game and know your relationship to them. This payoff was satisfying enough for me that the game, [i]just barely[/i], earned its positive review.
[/spoiler]
[h1]Raids[/h1]
The game also has semi-secret raids but they are not that special. They will test the strength of your party like no other encounter but can be trivialized because every fight gives you the option to escape. The last raid especially is just so overpowered that I saw no point in grinding for hours just to beat [i]that[/i] last bit of content. The others are actually pretty fun and can be challenging if you enter them just at the right level (because being underleveled makes them unplayable and being overleveled makes them boring).
[h1]Conclusion[/h1]
While writing this I flip-flopped between a positive and negative rating [b]A LOT[/b]. Ultimately, I determined my verdict based on the question: "Did I feel like I wasted my time playing this game?" To which the answer is, perhaps surprisingly, "No."
My initial playthrough took 4 to 4.5 hours & with a new enemy on each of the 59 floors, that means a new enemy every 4 minutes. Coupled with the dialogue and item descriptions that also add to this frequency of discovering new content, this raises the density of fun moments enough that it never got too stale. Especially the last floor was just a great payoff after what was a pretty patchy experience.
[h1]Should you buy this?[/h1]
[b]Maybe.[/b] If you want smart combat, a lore-rich story, or just an ok JRPG, the game fails. If you like shutting your brain off and let a trainwreck become a thing of beauty, this can be worth it. I’d draw the comparison to Goat Simulator. It’s a terrible platformer, the physics make the game unreliable/frustrating to play at times but you don’t play Goat Simulator for that. You want to see stuff break, see how the game knows that it breaks. The Tower of Wowers gave me a rise often enough by virtue of being such a creatively unrestrained piece of media that I don’t recommend it as a game in the usual sense, but just as something you experience for the ridiculousness of the game world itself.
But all of this is only something you can enjoy if you sink a couple of hours into the game, and there is a good chance you value your time more than this. (I won’t judge, I had to see the game from a completely different standpoint to come to this conclusion, as a party-based battler this is just very mediocre.)
tl;dr
[spoiler]I am giving The Tower of Wowers a positive review, not because it’s a “good” game, but because what it does from an entertainment PoV is good enough that if you vibe with absurd item descriptions and enemy designs at every corner, this can be highly enjoyable.[/spoiler]
