A Lovely Stranger You Meet in the Train on Your Way Home

Review of Tangle Tower, a game by SFB Games.

If I have to choose one word to describe this game, it will be: lovely. Because that’s what it really is, at the end of the day. It’s a small, charming game made with great love for the medium, for the genre, for the thing itself. It’s not groundsbreaking or Important with capital I. It doesn’t expect you to think too much about it. It’s a stranger you meet on the train home who you unexpectedly made friends with, who takes you out for dinner that same evening and tells you all sort of fun stories, and then when you say goodbye you realise you never asked for their contact info. Meeting them is a lovely, cherished memory even if it has no impact to your life at large.

But I’m just waxing poetic.

Tangle Tower is a point-and-click adventure game where you investigate a murder in a colourful mansion inhabited by an equally colourful cast. It’s definitely inspired by Ace Attorney with all its murder-investigation-and-wacky-cast, with a sprinkling of Professor Layton in the form of its puzzles. In a way, it’s a lighter, shorter experience: the puzzles are more fun diversions than brainteasers, the murder mystery is simpler and there’s only one murder instead of the 4-kinda-interwoved-cases formula in the Ace Attorneys.

But it more than makes up for that with its lovely, lively cast of characters.

Every. Character. Has. Full. Voice. Over. Brilliant voice over at that. I don’t usually like voices in my dialogue-heavy games as they tend to be pretty mediocre, and mediocre voices are distracting enough to ruin the experience. I also find listening to voices exhausting and would just prefer to play them in my own head anyway.

But Tangle Tower’s voices are the best I’ve ever encountered in this medium. Every line are perfectly tempered to suit each character and situation. And then you couple this with perfectly timed text scroll, with that perfectly tweaked animation, and, well. I said before that this game wasn’t groundbreaking. As far as audiovisual-of-a-dialogue goes, that’s pretty dang groundbreaking, actually.

I can’t imagine how much time and effort went to tweaking the precise timing of every sound, animation, and words in this game. The development team clearly loves what they’re doing, as they’re willing to go the extra mile to polish this to a beautiful shine. Even without bothering with the story or gameplay, I can just spend a while drinking in all that atmosphere.

Ah, but it does have a story. Tangle Tower is inhabited by two families who aren’t really feuding, not really, but they certainly bicker with each other like siblings: the Fellow family, and the Pointer family. An offshoot of the Fellow family, Freya Fellow, was murdered while she was painting a picture of Flora Fellow. The room was locked. Flora was unconscious. There was no murder weapon except for a painting of a knife with blood at its tip.

You play as Detective Grimoire, a bumbling but lovable detective and his much more reliable sidekick, Sally. Tangle Tower is a strange new place for him and for you, the player, but to its inhabitants it is home. Get to know the people, get to know the place, and maybe you’ll be able to piece out the murder too.

The cast has strong, wacky characterization, but behind the exaggerated gestures, they’re human at heart with perfectly mundane dramas. Neither the mystery nor the characters are particularly complicated, but its sincerity draw me in, anyway. Like the mundane plights of the stranger you met in the train: it’s interesting just by the virtue of not being yours, told with the sincerity of someone who doesn’t expect anything from you.

The ending leaves plenty to be desired. The murder was solved, but there were still questions that are only answered with speculation. You know now who every member of the Tangle Tower family are, but there’s a lot that can still be done with them. I wanted more. More of Tangle Tower. More adventures and mystery-solving with Grimoire and Sally.

But I can’t imagine more without unnecessarily prolonging the game. Once the night was over and your new friend has told you their story, you have to say goodbye, you have to go home. You still have to go to work tomorrow, and they have to as well. Maybe you’ll meet again some other time, but for now, this evening was enough. It has been a lovely time meeting him, but you have to go.