The game is a vast improvement in terms of presentation, including some fantastic performances from the voice cast, but it’s also a huge improvement as a game proper. Tangle Tower simply looks better than the previous games in every single category, further complimented by the selection of music that ranges from great thinking pieces to lively character tunes. Those animations are also quite a shock to the system coming off the previous game, fluid and detailed, and quite numerous, giving everyone a wide selection of poses. This makes everyone more unique, their personalities being felt out just from their shape and silhouette alone, further complimented by the smaller details. Characters during dialog also have much smoother animations, the art style of the last game modified from the team’s borderless, curvy characters to proper outlines and a wider selection of shapes and body types. It lets the setting absorb you better, which adds a lot to the game’s homey feel. The menus and HUD are notably changed to a more traditional scant icons and pop up menus rather than the side bars of the last game. Every screen is beautiful and unique, the team’s background art still being on point, now further supported by additional touches. Instead of the dark greens of the swamp, you now have a varied and light pallet complimented by rooms of each of the inhabitants unique spaces filled with personal details on each inhabitant. It’s vaguely mystical, with water that causes soil to create gem fruits, ancient statues not unlike our old friend Boggy, and unique wild life, instantly taking you out of your usual comfort zone. It’s an old, lived in place filled with bizarre things and secrets barely hidden on the surface to discover. The titular Tangle Tower, which is not really a tower (a plot point), is a fantastic setting to solve a mystery. Add in the strange object she added to the painting actually being painted with someone’s blood kept in Freya’s paint pot, and you have a very bizarre series of questions to answer. She doesn’t talk, which doesn’t help, but there are further complications by a lack of a murder weapon and Freya seemingly killed right next to the canvas – from a stab to her chest. A young painter, Freya Fellow, has been murdered while painting the manor’s owner, Flora Fellow. You figure out what you’re doing by looking at your case file, and then move over to the scene of the crime after exploring the grounds for awhile. The two have a completely different chemistry from any of Grimoire’s old relationships, Sally able to take Grimoire out of his comfort zone for comedy while being just as observant as he is. He’s now accompanied by Sally from the last game, a former suspect now working as Grimoire’s snarky assistant. Instead of an introductory exposition dump from Officer James and some mystery built by that mysterious girl who always seems to find Grimoire, you just see Grimoire arrive to the scene of the crime in silence. You can tell something is different from just the first scene. During all of that, the team rethought character dynamics, game structure, and puzzle design, resulting in one of the most polished detective games you’ll find out there. The project started shortly after the 2014 release, an attempt to take advantage of the Creative Europe’s funding program for narrative games, got put on hold to make Snipperclips, and finished up after with a two year dev cycle. Tangle Tower is so successful at this that it would invalidate the previous games if not for the fact that it does end up being a direct continuation of the previous game, despite implying otherwise initially. Come 2019, and it turns out they were taking their time, rethinking elements of the previous games and aiming to make something that put the series up to this point to shame. They’ve found a niche for themselves and have been pretty comfortable there, and it seemed like Detective Grimoire didn’t really have a place in there anymore. They’ve mainly been busy on mobile releases, the cutesy Switch co-op puzzler Snipperclips, and the goofily grim house haunting game Haunt the House, nothing particularly memorable but all quite charming and colorful. Five years after Vian brothers tried bringing Detective Grimoire into the commercial indie world, we finally have a sequel.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |