A Tangled Web of Lies

How the mysterious Tangle Tower fulfills the promise of Apple Arcade

Asking someone to pay $50-$60 a year for a bunch of phone games is a hard sell. While a AAA game can easily cost you that much (before you factor in in-game transactions) there are very different expectations when it comes to the cost and the value of phone games. It almost feels impossible for a single game to break that barrier and convince someone to subscribe. For a lot of people, Tangle Tower will be that game. It’s a Triple-A phone game.

Tangle Tower sees you play as a famous(?) detective Grimoire, asked to come to a house in the middle of nowhere to solve a seemingly impossible murder. You spend your time combing through the house and interrogating members of the families who live there to figure out whodunnit.

The game’s art hits you from the start and doesn’t let up

The art is spectacular. It manages to be vibrant, graphic, and full of dark contrast without sacrificing the legibility required for point-and-click adventures. The writing is engaging and the animations characters go through as they talk are varied and demonstrative. Like Assemble with Care, the voice acting is excellent. It feels like it has the type of polish I expect from a top-notch commercial game while also feeling perfect for a phone or tablet. It doesn’t feel like one of those games that secretly wishes it were on a console.

Pointing and Clicking

I don't have much experience with point-and-click adventure games but I started getting into Day[9]'s Mostly Walking Series. Watching him and his game designer friends explain their thoughts as they played each game helped me understand what's so exciting about the genre, and in part inspired this look at point and click games on Apple Arcade. I learned a lot of point-and-click games can be too opaque, either requiring too much existing knowledge of the genre or too much pecking around various screens to find important objects you can use later. Tangle Tower takes a different approach: instead of collecting items to use as verbs in puzzles, you explore the house using items to open lines of questioning from the other characters. 

The focus on questioning means you always know what to do. Explore rooms, find objects of interest, and ask characters about them. As you learn more you’ll open up interrogation moments, where you can combine knowledge into an insight that drives the plot forward. The focus on questioning makes it easy to know what to do next, but it also means that the dominant strategy is to "brute force" ask every character about every potential item in order to unlock the next line of questioning. This might seem like a flaw, but I think it's a clever nod to the challenge of the genre. If you want to play skillfully, you can, trying to figure out the minimal number of questions to ask each character to pull the story forward. But if you end up getting lost, you can fall back into brute force. And the game rewards you by giving you more stories and more details about the family. It turns from a challenging point-and-click to a delightful visual novel. 

The primary system of questioning helps connect your ideas with the plot of the game

Questioning isn't the only thing you'll do either, it's just the main thing. There are moments in the game where you'll need to use contextual clues to unlock puzzle symbols that will take you to secret locations.

What's in a Mystery

Tangle Tower gets what makes solving mysteries fun. It focuses on the relationship between the image you build in your head and the story being told by the game and then makes connecting the two a part of the gameplay. When you open a line of questioning, you're given a smaller subset of items, along with some words, to put together into a sentence that creates insight into the mystery. And if you're wrong, it'll let you know and gently nudge you towards the right direction. 

You're not solving puzzles to learn about the murder so much as you are trying to build a picture in your head to predict the outcome. Tangle Tower focuses on those moments where you get to prove whether or not you're creating the right image. It asks you to make connections on your own and then makes those answers a core part of the play.

Moving around the castle is easy and fun

The game has a bunch of clever touches that help keep the plot moving. It gives you a hint button you can use without penalty, letting you scope the difficulty to what you want, and meaning you never have to go to a walkthrough if you don’t want. And navigating is as simple as clicking into a map of the mansion and then tapping the room you want to go to. It means jumping around to talk to a bunch of different characters is easy. As Film Crit Hulk says, the game lets you move at the speed of your thoughts. 

Go Get It!

If you like visual novels or point-and-click adventures, Tangle Tower will absolutely make a subscription to Apple Arcade worth it for you. It's a full indie title on its own (about $20), which means you only have to find a few other games to play in order to make buying the full subscription worth it. 

If you want to play the game, you should get a copy (it's available on almost every platform) and play it.

Go get it, play it, and come back so we can talk about the ending.

You're Reading Journey to the Core

The Twist of it All (Spoilers ahead, for Knives Out Too, I guess)

Tangle Tower really feels, at least at the start, like Knives Out. It's a story about an old rich family (in this case multiple families) in decline dealing with strained relationships and the murder of a central figure in the group. Both stories combine the heaviness of murder with a jaunty and offbeat tone of writing and setting. And one of the common tropes of mysteries is the twist. A key piece of information that changes how we see the mystery while also tying together a bunch of disparate elements into a complete picture.

In the Knives Out twist, we discover that the murder was not actually murder, but an agreement between the patriarch of the family and his nurse to protect her from the legal ramifications of an accident. Tangle Tower also has a twist: we learn that the old mansion is actually a facility for the study of fantastical beasts. It's interesting to compare the two because they represent the opposite poles of how to expand a story. Knives Out doubles down on the relationships between the characters in the world whereas Tangle Tower explodes the concept of what's possible into a whole new set of questions and mysteries.

Knives Out's twist doubles down on the relationships between the family members. It makes the murderer the spoiled Grandson who couldn't imagine life without his inheritance emblematic of the entire family's inability to function on their own. The cleverness of it all is that the outcome reveals things about the relationships between each of the different family members. The assumptions they made about one another and their values and virtues. 

You Can't Disconnect Story from Gameplay

Ultimately, I didn't feel like the payoff for Tangle Tower was worth it for the direction the story took. From a "pure" gameplay perspective, I think Tangle Tower is a triumph. It has the type of UX that smooths many of the issues that point and click adventures face, while still delivering a compelling amount of user agency. But the point isn't the clever writing or the mechanics. The payoff of the game isn't the success of solving the murder, it's how clever you feel for making the connections the game left for you, and how close you got to the actual outcome. 

Tangle Tower disposed of the early connections, like the relationship between Poppy Pointer and Fritz Fellow, for an expansion into a world of mystical creatures. The killer's motives were simply a cover-up, there was no deeper knowledge to be gained, besides the surprise of a hidden identity. The reveal at the end felt more perfunctory than exciting.  By deciding to expand the game further into myths and mysteries it gives up what gave the game heart at the start. 

To be Continued?

Even with minor misses, the game is an incredible work of art. It’s exactly the type of game that I’d hoped to see all over the place on Apple Arcade. Just like Knives Out is getting future sequels, I'd be excited to play another game in the Grimoire series and I hope that more designers explore these types of narrative mechanics. 

Spread the Love

If you’ve been enjoying the writing and know someone who might be interested, please share it. It’s the best way to help my writing find new audiences!