I like the pleasant surprises with games. When you’re seeing something that looks very unassuming and then it turns out to be much more than it first appears. While I don’t remember if I’ve ever played the very first original freeware adventure of Detective Grimoire, I did play the second game Detective Grimoire: Secret of the Swamp. It was a cute little thing that didn’t feel that much evolved over the freeware adventure titles you’d see back on Newgrounds, even though it had good visuals and voice acting. So I didn’t expect much from Tangle Tower either. Turns out, this time the developers decided to really step up their game. Even if it’s not all great.
While the game is still relatively short (it took me around 3 hours to finish), it now feels like a proper game filled with interesting detective work for 3 hours, not a cute short time waster like the previous game was. It’s not super complicated, but the game does feel like a fun investigation, with lots of clues, lots of interviewing the suspects, lots of cross-referencing what you know and all that good detective stuff. Only the mini-game puzzles feel genuinely unnecessary, as some of them just kill the pace of the investigation without ever feeling like a fun part of the process, but even those aren’t bad. The visual style is good, the characters are interesting and the first two thirds of the game are extremely good.
I would’ve been raging about how great this game is if not for the last third, however. The pace suddenly changes, the game becomes linear in what it expects you to do and you’re suddenly locked into constant deductions that you’re solving one after the other, even though in the previous few hours you’ve done it only a couple of times. And then the story really falls flat on its face. It does the usual mistake you often see in smaller independent detective story productions – gets so caught up with its own overcomplicated “lore” that the case, that seemed to be just right with its twists and characters, simply falls apart. The last few moments of the game is just dumping unnecessarily convoluted story on the player and then rapidly tying everything up in a way that doesn’t really feel rewarding or fun.
It’s a shame, but Tangle Tower is still super fun to go through. And I’d highly recommend checking it out.