Tangle Tower

You wouldn’t be able to tell from the title, but Tangle Tower is the third game in the “Detective Grimoire” series—or, if you ask some people, perhaps the “second” game. Detective Grimoire started off as a free flash game way back in 2007. A full commercial game, Detective Grimoire: Secret of the Swamp was released in 2014 with a completely new art style. Since Secret of the Swamp was a complete revamp, one could argue that that is the first game... but as someone who played the original flash game way back when, Tangle Tower is unquestionably the third game.

But enough pointless history, let’s talk about fun things—like murders!

Detective Grimoire has been summoned to Tangle Tower, a mansion on a small island in the middle of a strange lake, to investigate the death of Freya Fellow, one of its inhabitants. Freya was stabbed, but the only weapon at the scene was the bloody knife in the portrait Freya had been painting at the time of her death—could Freya have been killed by the painting itself? Like the previous game, Tangle Tower gives us a fun, suggestive, almost themed setup to the murder.

Grimoire is joined by his assistant... Sally? At least, Grimoire is joined by an assistant, Sally. Presumably, she’s Sally Spears from Secret of the Swamp, but she has a completely different look. Nothing in Secret of the Swamp implied that Sally would become Grimoire’s assistant, and nothing in Tangle Tower alludes to Sally being the same Sally from Secret of the Swamp. She’s just... here now. There’s no direct issue with this, but the discontinuity between the games is strange, especially since Tangle Tower connects back to Secret of the Swamp in other ways. But we’ll get to that later. (And what happened to the little girl?!)

The bulk of Tangle Tower involves investigating the tower and questioning its inhabitants. Investigation is handled in simple point-and-click fashion: you click something in the background, and Grimoire will investigate it. (Or, more likely, make a snarky quip about it.) Most rooms also have a puzzle hidden within them. As for grilling the witnesses, you can ask each witness the same set of questions: about themselves, about the day of the murder, about each other character, and about each piece of evidence. Each character also has a secret you can uncover once you’ve gathered enough evidence, similar to a psyche-lock from Ace Attorney.

The investigation in Tangle Tower is simply superb. The creators clearly poured their love and passion into this game, and it shines through like a dazzling beacon.

Tangle Tower is a bizarre and wondrous place, and each room is its own magical, detailed world onto its own. The characters are wonky caricatures with all sorts of quirks and crazy designs. Pretty much every object in the game has a unique investigation reaction. If you see something that looks interesting, there’s a very good chance Grimoire (or Sally) will have something to say about it. Every single character has a unique reaction to every single piece of evidence as well. This light-hearted, joke-filled investigation in a weird location filled with weirder people will feel natural to anybody who’s played Ace Attorney before.

Oh, and the game is fully voice-acted. The writing was already fine, but the voice acting brings the game alive. Some of the more repetitive or flatter jokes still work just on the tone and delivery of the voice actors.

In addition to the investigation and puzzles, there is deductive gameplay that pops up as appropriate. Sometimes you need to select a piece of evidence that answers a question. But the main deduction mechanic involves creating a deduction by filling in four blanks. The first and third blanks will be nouns, and the second and fourth blanks will be connector phrases. You usually pick the first and third blanks from a pool of eight options, but there are other variants as well, such as when you need to point to a spot in two pieces of evidence. For each of the second and fourth blanks, you have about five different options to choose from for each space. This might sound complicated, but in practice it’s intuitive and straightforward. It also tends to be pretty easy. The questions Tangled Tower asks you are not that difficult, so you usually have a pretty good idea of the sentence you’re going to need to form before you even see the options. But if you don’t know the answer, the correct connector phrases are usually obvious, and then you just need to pick the nouns that fit into those phrases.

Creating good deduction mechanics is hard; they need to balance complexity and difficulty. You need to give players enough freedom to express their thoughts but the game needs to be able to tell when the player’s thoughts are correct, and the mechanic shouldn’t simply hand over the correct answer but should offer some guidance to players who truly have no idea. I think that this deduction mechanic for Tangled Tower (and the Detective Grimoire series generally) strikes a good balance in terms of complexity, but is too easy—but that the lack of difficulty is due to the implementation, rather than an inherent flaw in the mechanic itself.

Most of the game consists of the investigation. You investigate the tower, gather the evidence, expose everyone’s secrets, tie up some loose ends, and then quickly solve the case. As a mystery, the game is... not quite as strong as it is in other respects. The good: the set-up of the murder is wonderfully suggestive, and there is a logical explanation for how the murder was mechanically carried out. The bad: ...the rest of it. There are several major unresolved questions left at the end of the game, the motive is weak, weird, and a bit ambiguous, and the plotting of the resolution as a whole is underwhelming.

Some of these issues feel like they have resulted from content that was withheld in order to develop in a future game. I’m not sure how I feel about that, as Tangle Tower’s relationship with Secret of the Swamp is... complicated. As I already mentioned, the fact that a completely redesigned Sally is traveling with Grimoire seems to suggest a connection, but not direct continuity, between the two games. Tangle Tower initially seems completely separate from Secret of the Swamp, aside from the existence of Grimoire and Sally, but they become inextricably entwined by the end. What makes the relationship so difficult to gauge is the fact that some extremely minor unresolved plot threads in Secret of the Swamp ended up being expanded in Tangle Tower. Given that, even if the next Detective Grimoire game doesn’t come out for a decade, who knows what sort of open questions from Tangle Tower will be fully fleshed out?

Of course, even if that does happen, Tangle Tower itself still unfortunately feels rushed and unresolved.

But it’s okay that the ending isn’t that great, since the adventure to get there is so much fun. It’s a quirky mystery in a spooky murder mansion brimming with life and passion. If you like mystery games at all, I heartily recommend Tangle Tower; it could very well end up becoming your favorite Ace Attorney filler case.