Tower of Heaven

4 Tower of Moderate Frustration
Tower of Heaven is at once a gorgeous, wonderful, and intensely frustrating game. The storyline, minimalistic as it is, serves the game perfectly. You’re a thing, you’re climbing a tower to meet an asshole god for purposes that are your own, and he’s trying to kill you. To that end, he slowly adds weird rules which kill you if you break them, turning an already tricky precision-based platformer into a moderate nightmare – more playable than, say “I Wanna Be The Guy”, but still almost controller-tossingly frustrating at moments. I say “almost” because it never quite reaches that level. Yes, you need pixel-perfect jumping skills at times, something which I normally bemoan in my reviews, but it’s done quite well here, and unlike other games where it feels completely impossible, in our little friend Eid’s case it’s always tantalizingly possible, a just-one-more-try-I-swear-I-can-do-it sort of thing.

The artwork in game is a great homage to the glory days of the Gameboy, and by Gameboy I mean the four-double-A-brick Gameboys that you could hurt someone by throwing at their head. Animation is clean and fluid, and the music is remarkably pleasant. As far as the artistic content of the game goes, it’s brilliant, an absolute must-see.

So what, then is the limiting factors on Tower of Heaven? Well, there’s just one to speak of, that being that the game is short. I know I gripe about game length too often, but it honestly feels too slim, despite the high replay value that the timed runs give it. The least they could do would be to go the “Mighty Jill Off” route and give us an expert tower to beat after the first.

So, a great game, arguably a masterpiece, but with short legs. Still, only eight megs? That’s a worthy download if ever I’ve seen one. Get it, try it, you won’t be sorry.