We’re gonna start with, for me, the most important thing of any game: its gameplay. Is Twisted Tower fun to play? The answer is absolutely yes. It is extremely fun to play, and this game offers a high level of replayability.
One thing I think we’ll see quite often is people doing speed runs of this game. People have already completed it in a short amount of time and posted it online—the community has found ways to get through the game in under 30 minutes, or under 17 minutes, which to me is just insane. You can watch those videos. And there have also been people like myself who did a full playthrough on the hardest difficulty with no deaths and under 2 hours. The time is nothing to brag about at all, but trying to beat this game without dying is actually quite difficult. After I beat it on my first try on Twisted, I was like, I want to do that again, but I want to see if I can do it without dying. Very challenging, but a lot of fun — and I can tell you that final boss fight is a lot scarier when you’re going for a hardcore run.
One of the things I absolutely love about the gameplay, particularly in the sections where you’re fighting multiple enemies at once, is that you’re going to want to use different guns for different enemies. This is really encouraged on Twisted difficulty more than normal — on normal, you can get away with playing with just one type of gun if you wanted. The game encourages you to use your weapons differently during different encounters. For example, you’re not going to want to use the Misfire on every single enemy, just because it eats up a lot of bullets. The Misfire is actually really great for taking care of those pesky little phones that will be trying to murder you — they can easily overrun you if you’re not paying attention — or for clearing out the lower-level enemies that have less health, like Jerry the Giraffe or the Huggy Bears.
The weapons all come with an alternate fire mode or a special ability, and I found myself not really using the single-fire component on normal or hard difficulty, for the Misfire in particular. It takes like 4 bullets to kill Jerry the Giraffe on normal, but if you hold down the alternate fire, it launches 3 bullets at the enemy. Why am I bringing this up? I found myself just holding the left trigger and shooting, because it takes fewer bullets and I have that extra bullet I can keep for later. Ammo does tend to get scarce in certain sections of the game, especially if you’re not using it wisely, which is why you mustn’t waste your precious bullets on bullet sponges — like the mermaids, the seahorse, or the clowns with the buffalo machine guns. The last thing you want is to get stuck in a situation where you cannot kill the enemies just because you ran out of ammo.
There are a lot of sections, particularly in each of the rooms, where combat gets really intense, and enemies spawn out of nowhere — and I have to say, the most challenging thing about the game was those encounters. This game feels more like a thriller than a horror game. However, you still jump — especially during combat, or when you’re low on health and you don’t want to die, and you hear Jerry the Giraffe’s laugh, or the Huggy Bears saying “oh, hi there” as they come up to, well, not hug you, but stab you to death. It’ll make you jump if you’re not careful. And believe it or not, some of the scariest things you will encounter in the Twisted Tower are not the Huggy Bears — it’s those damn little telephones. I can’t tell you how many times those phones almost destroyed me. The enemy variety is good too; I was running into a lot of different types of enemies.
Another thing I absolutely love is the variety in the way you traverse levels. Once you unlock the fairy wings, they’re very great for combat, and they help you traverse around the map. Maybe there’s an enemy about to come up and eviscerate you — jump, do a backdash with your character, and you’re safe from their harm. Or you can slide around the map, take out your shotgun or the mallet, and pop off the heads of enemies. The sound effects and cues you get when you hit an enemy are just so satisfying to hear. And you can get real creative with what you do here, guys. You are not limited to using a handful of weapons — there are so many different ways you can take out enemies, traverse the map, or use the map to your advantage to kill enemies. I absolutely love that.
By far my favorite gun, hands down, out of the entire weapons roster is the Marvel gun. It doesn’t have an alternate fire, but what it does have is this: if you get a headshot that kills an enemy instantly, you get 50 tickets. Tickets can be quite scarce in this game, and you want them so you can buy things like ammo, upgrade your weapons, and things of that nature.
As for the upgrade station, one thing confused me. There’s increased clip size, and there’s buy ammo, and I was an idiot — for some odd reason I thought that every time I hit that ammo option, I was getting more ammo permanently. Turns out it just gives you ammo to load your weapon instantly, so you don’t have to find it. Don’t do that if you plan on saving your tickets. Really save your tickets for upgrading your weapons — get that alternate fire, get that clip size increase, the damage increase, and you’ll have a lot more fun. Weapon drops are pretty frequent even on the harder difficulties — not as scarce as they are on Twisted, I should say. And honestly, as long as you nail your headshots and switch between using your mallet sometimes, you’ll be good.
Now, a caveat — I’m not going to spoil the final boss fight for you. I will say, though, that the final encounter in the game is by far the most disappointing, just because it was very easy. You could still die if you’re not careful, but it wasn’t so much the threat of the actual boss himself doing damage to you — it was more the environment trying to do the work. That final boss battle was extremely anticlimactic compared to all the other encounters you go through in the game. Maybe there’ll be updates sent out to make that encounter a little more challenging, but the encounter you have with Mr. Twister at the very end of everything is, I hate to say it, one of the most disappointing aspects of the gameplay.
Twisted Tower’s strongest suits are its environment, ambiance, music, and gameplay. Its weakest link is the story. I hate to say that, because it was the story that kept me going — it kept me entertained right up until the very end, but it didn’t have the punch, the landing that I was expecting it to have. And I can forgive it for that, because if the game’s primary focus were its story, I would say the game would have an issue — but the gunplay and the world-building that Thomas Brush and his team have created here are definitely, I would say, among his best. I’m not saying it was abysmal and I’ll never play it again. No — I see myself coming back to play Twisted Tower many times over. This game has a very fun loop.
