1650: Ascension

You may recall a while back I talked a little about an indie game called Towerfall, a game that was originally intended to be the poster child for the ill-conceived Android microconsole the Ouya, but which subsequently came to other platforms including PS4 and PC. When I originally talked about it, I’d only tried the Versus mode — the mode the game was originally built around — but today Mark and I gave the cooperative two-player Quest mode a shot.

It’s a hell of a lot of fun, maintaining much of the chaos of the competitive multiplayer mode while presenting its own challenges as you and a partner work together to fend off increasingly difficult waves of enemies.

As Mark pointed out while we were playing, the closest comparison is probably Bubble Bobble, but with Towerfall being a modern game, it does all manner of things that the technology of Bubble Bobble’s era simply wouldn’t have been able to manage. Things like lighting and distortion effects on the screen; slow-motion sections; complex enemy waves; physics effects; and all manner of other things.

The genius of Towerfall — and presumably the reason it’s so well regarded as a top-tier indie title — is because it doesn’t try to do too much. It’s a series of single-screen arenas — a la Bubble Bobble — in which all you have to do is defeat all the enemies in a series of waves in order to proceed. But it’s the design of these waves — and the enemies themselves — that makes the game so good.

Each individual enemy’s behaviour is relatively simple, and it’s straightforward to figure out how to deal with most of them without any prompting from the game whatsoever — this is a game that is well and truly of the old school, eschewing unnecessarily long and tedious tutorial sequences and instead throwing the player(s) straight into the action at the earliest possible opportunity. You learn through discovery rather than through being told — and in doing so, you can feel yourself getting better and better each time you play. And you’ll need to — because this game is hard.

Yes, the pixel-art aesthetic isn’t the only old-school thing about Towerfall; it also has the difficulty level of an old-school arcade machine. The first couple of levels are deceptively straightforward, then the difficulty starts to ramp up pretty quickly, culminating in some extremely challenging battles later in the game. Never do things become overly complicated, though; you’re always dealing with the same types of enemies, with the same attack patterns, just in varying combinations. And it’s the good design and pacing of each of these levels that makes the game so enjoyable and satisfying to play.

Well, that and the ability to fire an arrow at particularly troublesome enemies and pin them to the wall with it. Who hasn’t wanted to do that to an army of slimes and grim reapers?