Tangle Tower

It was fun! Without spoilers, my biggest criticism of the game was that the ending was a little disorienting and I feel could have had a better set-up, but other than that it was a fun detective puzzle game with good music and visuals.

I bought the whole series purely because I was interested in the latest release and am currently going through a bit of a point and click kick. The first game was super charming and had me excited for this one but I am somewhat disappointed with the puzzle side of things so far. The artwork, animation, and vibe of the game are all excellent and a big step up from the first. However, I have found a lot of the puzzles and clues to either be convoluted or not make sense, or just certain events will pop up and you're just like "huh? idk what I did to trigger this conclusion" etc. I'm optimistic that the third game will hopefully be better, but unsatisfied with this installment.

A dinâmica de investigação é um dos pontos fortes do jogo. A direção de arte e a trilha sonora são muito bem executadas e contribuem para a atmosfera. Apesar de os diálogos serem um pouco arrastados em alguns momentos, a história consegue prender a atenção e entrega uma experiência satisfatória.

Отличная игра. Прекрасные персонажи, живые диалоги, шикарный арт и звук. Одна из тех немногих игр, где я провалился в просмотр арт-альбома с комментариями разработчиков. Одно предостережение - это не квест в классическом понимании. Это в некотором роде VN. Стандартный процесс такой - мы заходим на локацию, немного пиксельхантим на ней объекты. Потом если тут есть персонаж - говорим с ним на 3 темы, спрашиваем о каждом предмете-улике. После чего идём в новую локацию (или еще раз проходимся по старым персонажам, чтобы показать им новые предметы). После нахождения определённых улик у каждого персонажа открывается возможность поговорить на четвёртую тему, самую важную. Самым вариативным тут является подбор главной фразы - когда мы из улик и заготовленных кусочков предложения должны составить правильную фразу типа (окно) + (было открыто) +(невестой) + (ради свежего воздуха) И это в принципе основной геймплей. Кроме этого в игре есть несколько головоломок, и они в принципе неплохие, но их маловато. То есть никаких инвентарных головоломок (кроме разговоров на их тему), никаких диалоговых головоломок (у всех персонажей 3+1 темы плюс перебор комментариев о всех уликах). Все экраны очень удобно открываются на большой карте. В общем всего того, за что любят (и ненавидят) классические квесты. На 90% игра состоит из болтовни 3-х персонажей. Но диалоги классные. История хорошая. Прошёл с большим удовольствием.

设计和美术特别厉害，就是推理有点对不上我的脑电波ww

A very pretty, cute, and puzzling game, but the ending kind of ruins it not gonna lie. Get it on sale tbh. The game for the most part is a well animated and fully voiced murder mystery. With a very interesting cast of characters to go along with it's story. But the story itself falls flat at the end, like some other detective stories. The ending of a murder mystery is what truly sells the story and Tangle Towers doesn't have the best ending. It's an exposition dump from a killer who (in my opinion) wasn't sufficiently hinted at. They come up out of nowhere and reveal two twists at once in doing so. Their atmosphere was good but their actual story build up wasn't. It felt like there was a whole other chapter of puzzles that I hadn't found yet, that would have more properly given the clues to suspect the killer. I'll admit the red herrings are pretty good. But even as I was finishing out the ending some of these supposed red-herrings didn't seem as intentional as others. I myself got the game at a pretty good discount of 80% for about $3.50, when it's usually around $18. And that high price is pretty well spent on every part of the games. It's beautiful and wonderfully stylized, the music is great and the voice acting is phenomenal. The puzzles can be difficult, but nothing a little break won't fix. It's not bad persay, just disappointing.

It's a beautiful, atmospheric game, but do not expect a complex or satisfying answer to the overall puzzle. Detective Grimoire also had a somewhat dissatisfying solution, but the game's smaller scope, its age by the time I discovered it, its unpretentious flash-game origins and mood made me expect less, and so be less prone to disappointment. It was just cute, and funny, and very relaxing, with great music. I have nothing but positive feelings about Detective Grimoire, because the minor weakness of the conclusion (which did not set itself up as anything grand, and didn't establish [spoiler]the victim as someone deserving any sympathy[/spoiler].) didn't outweigh the relaxed enjoyment of the overall experience, and didn't undermine or contradict the preceding setup. Tangle Tower, though... While still funny, the game takes itself a lot more seriously and tries to imply a far more complex web of potential character motives to have enacted the murder - and ultimately [spoiler]it's all a stack of red herrings and what feel like abandoned 'plots that might have been', as though a convoluted writing and design process toyed with alternative answers to the big question, then reworked those suspicious qualities and motives into dead ends and innocent(ish) misunderstandings[/spoiler]. It's beautiful, it has lovely music, it's mostly very well-written, but it builds up something considerably more grand and genuinely sad than its predecessor... and fails to live up to itself. It [spoiler]establishes that the murder victim was a complex, interesting person with a lot of potential, but gives no coherent explanation for the absurdly complicated and silly method of murder or its motivations, or why the murderer remained in plain sight. It asks the questions during the exposition-dump finale, but none of the answers make any sense, either as rational justifications or the delusions of the insane, as the character seems perfectly calm and in control. They just never actually explain anything, even while giving every appearance of answering the questions. It feels like the ending condition was written well in advance and a failed attempt to justify that end-condition was crudely hammered together to fit an existing gap, rather than to create an organic, intuitive, believable/logical series of events[/spoiler]. It's such a pity. I bought Tangle Tower in a completion bundle along with their new game, Mermaid Mask (IIRC?), and now I'm not sure I want to play the next one. Maybe the creators have learned from the flaws of Tangle Tower? I hope so. While it was still an enjoyable experience for the first few hours, before falling into a very railroaded final 1-2 hours of gameplay that was mostly a dump of incoherent exposition, I do encourage people who want a chill point and click to pick this up on a sale and enjoy the art and atmosphere, but.. Do not invest any hope or expectation of the conclusion making any sense. A good 75% of the narrative implications and hints are entirely abandoned or contradicted, a good chunk of the game is rendered nonsensical by the way the game ends. Several conflicting script rewrites seem to crash into each other when development rushed an ending with what feels like a whole chapter missing - and the last several chapters are only minutes long and pretty much entirely linear. I don't regret buying it, as such - but I see the purchase as a way to say thanks for Detective Grimoire. Tangle Tower is a beautiful failure - optimistically (if cynically) I'd like to think it was a failure of ambition and scope vs budget/spoons limitations. I don't want to attribute the collapse of the plot to incompetence, as the artists behind these games seem to be genuinely clever, tasteful, funny people... But I must acknowledge that the game feels like it imploded at a certain point in development, and that its conclusion was hacked together from mismatched, compressed spare parts. YMMV, but the 'overwhelmingly positive' reviews on this seem insane to me - the ending makes no sense and most of the game's questions are left unanswered.

The characters, art style, music, and overall settings are all delightful and add a ton to the feeling of the game, not to mention the voice acting, which is absolutely superb. However, as a mystery game, this game fumbles the bag quite hard. The actual way to progress in this game blind is to effectively present every piece of evidence to every individual. This shotgun approach is the antithesis of the surgical, methodical gameplay of most detective games, which makes it feel like the individual isn't figuring anything out for themselves, but is just being railroaded by the writers. But by far and away the worst part of the game is the ending. The plot accelerates into terminal velocity as all the intrigue and plot twists come out in the last 10% of the game in a massive exposition dump, but somehow, many of the most important/interesting plot threads are left unaddressed. Maybe the next game addresses and builds off these plot threads to create an even more satisfying conclusion, but as the game stands now, the ending ruined the payoff of the game for me.