Tower of Time

"I'm free to roam on dummy screens and magazines"

Massive Attack - Group Four

 

Tower of Time starts with a tot. What? Don't look at me like that, I didn't make this shit up.

Upholding his people's noble tradition of runnin' like a lil' bitch

 

Oh, wait... it's an RPG's opening sequence... all hands, brace for exposition!

Let's see, once upon a time fluffy bunnies, then bad happens and everything is tax day forever, which is to say until someone invents plucky young farmboys and saving the world comes back into fashion. Also there's a good king and a meeee-steeerious shadowy figure that's probably an evil wizard and a gluteus ouchimus crystal throne, and then you fight some walking skeletons. Right. Y'know, you could've just said "fantasy story" and saved us both thirty minutes of cutscenes and slideshows.

 

I thought coming down with COVID last week would be a good time to clear through some more of my unplayed game collection, and started with a title I was sure I'd be able to dismiss after a few hours like Slay the Spire, or would disappoint and frustrate me into quitting despite its potential like Mordheim. Instead, Tower of Time seems intent on earning my grudging respect by building upon the lowest common denominator. And I do mean lowest:

While you handle exploration and puzzles through a standard isometric dungeon crawl interface, combat encounters place you on a certain number of pre-made maps. Enemies usually spawn in randomly from gates all around you. Mow 'em down as they come, arcade-style. Will you also be forced through an alternate mode babysitting helplessly fragile objectives? You bet! Do the maps offer enough diversity to create new tactical challenges? Hell no, just keep redirecting to whichever portal's currently spawnin' baddies, keep wiping that windshield from side to side, unto victory! Your playable characters are hardly more ambitious, with a pared-down four-attribute stat system and five resistances plus armor, and yes, inevitably my very first piece of loot already sported a +3 resist all effect invalidating choice.

Don't expect more originality or coherence out of the basic setting either, with its standard-issue skeletons / orcs / giant bugs segueing into steampunk automatons as enemies.

 

But if any of you have read my other reviews you might guess this is the point where I say "however"... so yeah:

However...

 

As trite a basic plot as it lays out at the start, Tower of Time dedicates some effort to expanding upon it, level by level, unveiling more of the backstory as you descend, to justify each new enemy theme. It's not a coherent narrative per se, but I'd be remiss not to admit I myself advocated just the year before ToT came out for more megadungeons arranged around factions sequentially displacing each other, with only the loosest justifications. And, while not exactly the "Mad Max with dragons and magic wands" I called for as a logical consequence of a world's life-force fading, ToT does manage to maintain that theme of decay better than most RPGs claiming such. As consistently hackneyed as individual elements may be (the nature-loving elf, the gratuitously Scottish dwarf, the ridiculously overblown Organthe) the overall assemblage does manage to avoid strict white hat / black hat dichotomies to a susprising and refreshing extent.

The same goes for gameplay: trite and simplistic setup, decently fleshed out. Those four basic stats actually lead to less min-maxing than you'd do in a standard D&D cRPG, your pre-made character roster nonetheless has some leeway in skill choice, and the windshield wiping routine (at least on hard difficulty) is spiced up by varying movement speeds and skill cooldowns. Even the elemental resistances are given more relevance than usual via massive differences from monster to monster as in Divinity: Original Sin. Puzzle solving, while leaning harder than it should on pixel-hunting or non-sequiturs, is fully integrated into your progression through each level - and if you don't believe me, check out the user reviews bitching about being confused by simple binary net puzzles.

 

Don't expect much relevant difficulty. By strictly tying your characters' leveling into your dungeon progress (i.e. no EXP for kills) and feeding you an easy cash/loot grind via "challenges" in town, ToT keeps a fairly strict rein on your power level. On hard difficulty I've been clearing most fights on a first try, with about 1/5-1/10 fights requiring a second try and occasionally being repeatedly frustrated by hitting high resistances to my overwhelming reliance on magic damage (due to my general "no filthy hu-mons" party membership rule denying me archers or the toughest tank.) But the most common source of failure is just random bullshit enemy waves spawning offscreen and instagibbing my back row, not anything pertaining to actual strategy or tactics.

And sure I could go on: the simple but aptly wistful audio, the few and not particularly convoluted moral choices nevertheless lent some relevance by splitting your party's opinions and acting as a favor minigame, the voice acting better than I'd expect, if somewhat hit-or-miss (Whisper sounds less like a mysterious mystical mistress of magic and more like a petulant valley girl) plus the writing, weak on dialogue but charmingly given unto its overblown epic worldbuilding, or the visuals, not particularly impressive on a small scale but showing more vision when it comes to multi-layered, cavernous interiors, despite failing to play up its upended floor/ceiling gimmick.

Tower of Time is... mediocre by design. Not bad by design, an accusation I was more than ready to hurl against it when I first fired up that plucky farm-boy intro and saw the "resist all" boots. It gets more than its share of flak from both sides of the quality divide: too simple a game for fans of RP classics, too complicated for the braindead Diablo 2-3 farmers. If you were to compare it with the wealth of skill/spell integration of Owlcat's Pathfinder adaptations, or with the coherent worldbuilding and characters of Tyranny or The Age of Decadence or the latter's stringent difficulty settings, then yes, ToT falls miserably flat. But once I realized how hard it feigns mindless loot-grinding Diablo-clone trappings at first glance and nevertheless then tries to trick that brainless ARPG audience into tasting tactical gameplay and looking past good vs. evil tropes, I can't help but give ToT some credit for trying to elevate expectations.

Some.

Not too much credit, mind you.

Still, for generic $12-20 RP-lite fare, it's better than it could've been.