Deadly Hall

"I’m on a list of murder suspects. Always thought that would be kinda cool. But it’s just tedious."

"Tangle Tower"

That upcoming open-world Sherlock Holmes game by Frogwares sounds interesting, but I don't have the hardware at the moment...

Detective Grimoire and his sassy assistant Sally are summoned to the titular Tangle Tower to solve the murder on Freya Fellow. Tangle Tower is located on an island in a curious lake with purple water and surrounded by cliffs and despite the name, Tangle Tower is actually a building with two towers, connected at the base by the main building. In the past, the manor served as the residence of a certain family, but after a few generations of marriages and deaths, none of the original family remain in Tangle Tower. Now it's inhabitated by members of the Fellow and Pointer families, who each live in their own tower (think Murder Among the Angells). The victim Freya was one of the younger generation and was working on a painting of her relative Flora in the top room of the Fellow tower. A horrible noise coming from the room attracted the attention of everyone in Tangle Tower, and when they kicked open the locked door, the inhabitants found Freya lying right in front of her unfinished painting, stabbed in her chest. No weapon is found in the tower and Flora refuses to say anything about what happened, but curiously enough, Flora seems to be holding a bloody knife in the painting and it turns out real blood was used for the red 'paint'. Detective Grimoire first fears that it's the painting itself that killed Freya, stabbing her while she was painting, but once he and Sally start to poke around and question the people at Tangle Tower, they realize that everyone has a secret to hide, and some of those secrets are not quite innocent.

Tangle Tower is a 2019 iOS/Switch/Steam mystery adventure game and the sequel to Detective Grimoire and Detective Grimoire: Secret of the Swamp. I haven't played any of the previous titles, but this title caught my attention the moment it was announced: the writing was funny, the artstyle unique and catchy and of course, it was a murder mystery! Having finished the game, I can say it's not absolutely necessary to have played the previous games, but it would definitely result in a more rewarding experience if you did: the game introduces some story-related elements near the end that I suspect are references/direct connections to Secret of the Swamp, and some of this is left a bit too vague for people who don't know anything about the other games.

Anyway, I guess the easiest manner to describe Tangle Tower is to call it a mix between Ace Attorney and the classic point & click adventures like Monkey Island. You control Detective Grimoire and Sally as they wander around the manor looking for clues and interrogate the suspects. Pretty standard adventure material here: question everyone about the murder, find clues, confront suspects with clues etc. The manor is a gorgeous place to explore: the cartoon art style reminds of classics like The Curse of Monkey Island and works wonderfully well with the witty writing: the larger-than-life characters who are just not quite ordinary remind of the characters in the Ace Attorney games (great animation!) and interrogating them is just fun. You can examine a lot in this game too, and you're always treated to some entertaning banter between Grimoire and Sally. The game is fully voice-acted too, adding to the cartoon style.

Tangle Tower looks and sounds absolutely fantastic, but how does it fare as a mystery game? Well, it's a bit uneven at times. My least favorite parts are probably the mechanical puzzles, as I seldom like them in mystery games. Like I mentioned in my review of The Testament of Sherlock Holmes, why does everyone keep important stuff (evidence/clues ) in little safes that can be opened by solving a mechanical puzzle!? Every person in Tangle Tower has something important hidden away in some mini-safe that is only locked by a puzzle, and not say, a key. The first half of the game can be quite monotonous for that reason: you're just asking all the characters about their alibis etc and solving little mechanical puzzles that always give you some very significant clue. This collect-everything-needed-before-we-proceed part of the game is quite long, and there are no real developments in the story or anything.

Once you have a better grasp on the case though, Tangle Tower starts to focus more on solving the murder mystery. After collecting enough evidence, you can start confront the suspects to make them reveal their secrets (everyone has something to hide). These segments include an interesting deduction system, where you have to make a statement (accusation) by constructing a sentence. The sentence follows the structure [noun] + [verb construction] + [noun] + [verb construction], and you usually are presented somewhere between five to ten options for each sentence element. The game will only proceed if you manage to construct the correct sentence, so it's an interesting way to test whether the player really knows what's going on and following the current line of investigation, as having to construct a full sentence is a lot harder than just picking one out of three options. This mechanic reminds of the one used in Trick DS, where you could combine three elements (objects, circumstances, location, persons) to form a hypothesis which could be used in various situations. While this mechanic can, theoretically, become quite complex by adding more and more elements, it's kept relatively simple in both Tangle Tower and Trick DS. In Tangle Tower, you shouldn't have too much trouble figuring out what the correct sentence is if you paid attention, but it's still a good mechanic to actually make sure you did pay attention. It's a shame that at other times, the characters of Grimoire and Sally seem to make deductions/interpretations of the evidence on their own, without the player's input. Perhaps the developers couldn't think of a way to 'test' the player first, but it's at those times that you feel a disconnect between the player and the characters, as things are done for the player, while at other points you do have to more thinking on your own.

The core murder mystery plot however is not particularly memorable. The way it uses one element that is unique to the enviroment of the setting of Tangle Tower is clever and well-foreshadowed as is the use of the painting, but at the core the truth behind how the locked room murder was committed is fairly basic. I also imagine that many players will find the conclusion rather rushed and understated. The motive is not really convincing as it is shown now, and like I mentioned before, some elements involved with the conclusion of the story are somewhat related to the previous game. Other elements are kept vague as possible hooks for future games I suspect, but because of that, some scenes and character motivations don't feel convincing enough, and on the whole, the murder mystery plot seems just one or two steps away from something much better.

I did enjoy Tangle Tower on the whole though. As a standalone mystery story, it could have been fleshed out more, but the journey of discovery itself is fun, with witty writing, memorable characters and a great visual style. The sentence-based deduction system is interesting and I'd love to see a more robust and comprehensive version of it in other games. Tangle Tower is not that long, so perfect if you're looking for something short to squeeze between games with a larger scale.