Tower Wizard is an incremental idle game where you passively earn various currencies needed to build your wizard tower higher and higher. With each major upgrade, you unlock a new section of the tower that handles a different kind of magic or political function, be it sending diplomats to other nations to obtain buffs and materials, or upgrading your magic academy to gain knowledge faster. Manage and allocate resources across different parts of your tower to earn even more resources, even faster. Tower Wizard is a game that’ll have you rotate between furious menu navigation and letting it run in the other room while you do the dishes.
At first I wasn’t as sure as you’d think about approaching the genre again. I had a great experience with it before, in 2013’s Cookie Clicker, but ultimately fell off after completing what I expected was most of the content and growing bored of it. There is a point a few hours into playing Wizard Tower, however, where God comes down and says, “Hey, this is neat that you have a whole civilization and all, but you’re not allowed to build this tower any higher.” You do what any good tower wizard would do and reply, “Watch me.”
This was the final domino, the perfect touch of silliness that allowed me to let my guard down and fall in love with it. This was also the moment that I decided it was going to live in one of my secondary monitors until my time with it comes to an end. Who knew all I needed was a paper-thin, goofy narrative and a few quality-of-life improvements?
The quality-of-life changes that I see here over previous idle games I have experienced, like 2017’s Scream Collector, seem pretty transformative and interesting. At least they’re interesting and different enough to keep me engaged. Tower Wizard encourages different approaches with the ability to “prestige,” which restarts the game but gives you access to new major buffs that you can unlock in almost whatever order you want. Restarting also allows you to allocate resources to parts of the tower differently so that you can get a more efficient flow going, which is especially helpful if you noticed that you ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up before.
Tower Wizard also offers a surprising amount of control for a simple idle game that makes it easy to throw it around my desktop. Not only can you drag and fit it to any monitor seamlessly, but it also works pretty well on a vertical screen due to the nature of it being based on a tower shape. For this reason too, it is much more visually appealing from an artistic standpoint as much as it is from a mechanical legibility and flow standpoint.
It’s not that Cookie Clicker can’t adapt to you snapping it to another screen; it just has to signpost more to an audience that hadn’t experienced an idle game yet, and it gets stale quickly because you have neat rows of dozens of the same five pixel-art grandmas and thick lines between each resource. Tower Wizard gets to benefit from not being the first to a genre. Players know how these kinds of games work now, so they were able to use a much simpler, laid-back design that involves mousing over the different areas of the tower instead of having all the data on your screen at once. You can also swap between six versions of the simple five-color palette so you can go with whatever vibe you want for your setup.
I think this is really nice, because I often put it in monitor two or three and let it live there when I’m watching a video, working, or just doing things around the house. It’s been really fun and refreshing to balance the numbers, manage my tower, and get to know another idle game.
