I just played the demo for Twisted Tower, on the recommendation of Splattercat. After finishing it, which took a little under two hours, here are my thoughts:

The options menu had available resolutions of 834×480, 1280×720, 1920×1080, 2048×1080, 2360×1440, 3440×1440, and 3840×2160. That’s technically a wide variety, but I couldn’t help but notice that none of them were a good fit for my monitor. So I settled.

And the opening cutscene showed me very thick, brightly glowing streaks that were supposed to be streetlit rain. There would be a few other visual glitches later, minor but noticeable.

Anyway, it’s London, 1945, and our protagonist, Tiny, has just been Dear Johnned by his beloved Charlotte. Then someone slips an invitation under his apartment door, apparently for this… let’s call it an amusement park.

My first impression of the park was “this looks good, in a cartoonishly foreboding sort of way.” My second impression: “I can’t walk off the pier, your immersive sim card has been revoked.”

For those of you who’ve watched that Splattercat video, or intend to: he may have been led a little astray by the developer namechecking Bioshock, which is (arguably) an immersive sim. In hindsight, the dev may have meant he was aspiring to the quality of Bioshock’s ambience…

American McGee’s Alice also got namechecked in that video, probably also for its ambience rather than its protagonist characterization, because Tiny seems tonally all over the place. As I approached the entrance, he said, “What the hell is this place?” Tone: understandably worried. Two seconds later, picking up a gore-spattered mallet: “This should come in handy.” Tone: pleased and cheerful. And after using said mallet on the first enemy, a human-sized knife-wielding teddy bear: “Ugh, what was that guy’s problem?”

(I’m calling it now: either Tiny will kill Charlotte at the end, despite what the park’s sinister proprietor seems to be promising him, or he killed her already and is abysmally deep in denial.)

I started noticing minor mechanical issues to go with the minor visual glitches. I sometimes got a “loot pickup” prompt that was unresponsive for a couple of seconds. And I’d have liked to have been able to back out of the pause menu with the ESC key; this came up a lot as I jotted down notes.

On to the combat, which isn’t the demo’s strength. There were two flavors of fight: annoyances that came in singly or in small numbers and served mainly to keep my head on a swivel (I approve), and larger fights where the room locks down and a steady stream of enemies spawns out of thin air. Including behind you, at close range. And the enemies could have been more generous with sound cues.

While it was fun double-tapping ax-crazy plushies with a revolver or winding up to brain something with the mallet, it was less fun when I was taking aim and three of those ankle-height toy telephones bum-rushed me from behind. I only got past one of these arenas by retreating to a balcony section which bugged out most of the enemies’ pathfinding, so they stopped trying to swarm me.

Getting a Tommy gun helped with the arena problem, a bit, but the enemies started packing heat too…

There was also some light platforming, with a pit to jump over and some traversal with a grappling hook. (It wasn’t immediately obvious what that flickering coil-thing was; I had to search for another YouTube video to learn that bouncing your hook off of it temporarily turned on a nearby, inactive grappling anchor point..)

Anyway, wishlisted. I can’t recommend this fully until I see the price and how much polish and combat balance gets added to the full game. Most of the problems I had with the demo could be polished or balanced away, though, and I liked the atmosphere and at least parts of the hinted-at descent-into-madness storyline.

P.S. I love “Miss Fire” as the name of a gun.