If you dunked Sherlock Holmes into Dr. Seuss’s color palette and then gave him a funny noir crime to solve, you would have something approaching the tone and style of Tangle Tower. The new point and click adventure game from SFB Games (Snipperclips) is a fun little mystery with a vibrant cast of characters that will keep you guessing until the end.
It’s difficult to discuss the story without getting into spoilers, so I’ll stick to the store page description and add some additional context:
“Freya Fellow has been murdered. The lead suspect? A shadowy figure found looming over her body, wielding a knife. The problem? That suspect... is just a painting.”
The concept of a murderous painting is just bizarre enough to pull in players, and the only thing I’ll say beyond that is that I found the payoffs for this central mystery worthwhile.
At its core, Tangle Tower is a classic locked room mystery. You solve the mystery by interacting with the residents of Tangle Tower, a unique setting that is actually two towers built on top of a mansion, on an island, in the middle of a giant lake. The tower houses two families with a complicated history, and each person has their own compelling backstory that only complicates things further.
Fifi, one of the many colorful characters you meet within the tower.
You play as Detective Grimoire and his sidekick Sally. The game never really explains their backstory or relationship at all, so while Sally makes one or two references to being Grimoire’s sidekick, in practice they actually feel more like equal partners, with Sally even taking the lead in several instances when Grimoire is humorously clueless. Grimoire fancies himself more of a hard boiled than the traditional Holmes model, while Sally has something of a punk rock detective vibe. Together they’re one of my favorite teams in a game this year. Sally’s sharp-witted spunkiness combined with Grimoire’s dry seriousness about detective work makes for a fun time.
The entire game takes place at the eponymous Tangle Tower; a collection of rooms you explore by clicking on various important looking on-screen objects. Every object you click on will have some kind of voiced line associated with it, even if it is ultimately unimportant to your investigation. Some of the objects you find will be added to your case file as clues, while others will unlock puzzles. The puzzles are mostly some kind of visual logic puzzle; for example an early puzzle has you comparing a treasure map to a photograph to work out the location of “treasure”. The difficulty is on a fair enough curve, cleverly starting with a very easy puzzle that is designed to teach you how the game will work rather than actually challenge you right at the start. Each puzzle is well telegraphed for you to understand, to the point that only one puzzle in the whole game had me resorting to trial and error. It may be my fault because I understood what the point of the puzzle was, but I couldn’t work out exactly how to solve it properly without trying a few possible solutions until it worked. You won’t find any pixel hunting or puzzles that require you to combine objects together and make huge leaps in logic like other famous point and clicks. If you get truly stuck, there’s even a simple hint system that will suggest what rooms you should investigate to get unstuck.
The unique sentence puzzles.
One of the more unique components of the gameplay is the sentence system (I don’t think this has an actual name). To solve certain important mysteries throughout the game, your character creates a sentence that states the answer. It’s your job to build a true statement from a set of options. I like this idea because it gives the player a feeling that they are actually solving the mystery firsthand. It requires you to understand the mystery you’re solving; these moments typically appear as the main characters have worked out what’s going on, but they leave it up to you to prove you’re following along too. It is technically possible to brute force these sections of the game, but if you’ve been playing properly you should be able to get the correct answer every time.
While the gameplay largely keeps things moving, I felt by the end of the game that meeting new characters was a slog. All of the characters you meet have vibrant personalities that make them fun to interact with, however each interaction inevitably devolves into clicking through the options so you can get to the next puzzle. In order to progress through the story you have to go through multiple conversations with each character, so it gets a bit repetitive.
The slowness of these sections is mitigated somewhat by the fact that every line in the game is voiced and the performances are quite good. Not just “good for a game of this size,” but just plain good. Each character is performed with distinction, accenting the fantastic art style and fluid animation. During conversations, you’re essentially only looking at a picture of whatever character is talking, but these portraits are animated to give the impression of life. The combination of voice and visual sells not only the characters, but the stories they’re telling you about the world.
Sometimes the best praise you can give a work is wishing that it had lasted longer, and in this case I feel like Tangle Tower is brilliant, but short. While there is no in-game clock, I estimate it only took me about 3 hours to complete, played in short bursts over a few days. In that way it is more a Sherlock Holmes short story than a novel. Truthfully the length works just fine on mobile. The game is designed for you to be able to hop in, solve a single puzzle or explore a room, and then hop back out. However, as you near the end you can really feel that you are nearing the end, and that this short length is going to be the whole game. If I had played on Steam or a platform where I expect to spend more time with the game I may have been disappointed. Even if it only takes you 3 hours, Tangle Tower is certainly worth those hours. Pick it up on a portable platform if you can and solve a quick mystery on the road.