It's refreshing to see in a genre that so often falls back on paying tribute to the classics. Rarely does a point-and-click manage to distinguish itself visually from Sierra Entertainment and LucasArts' game-ography, but the Detective Grimoire follow-up doesn't even humour homage, embracing its own identity with pride. Thankfully, SFB Games hasn't spared any expense when it comes to Tangle Tower. There's so much that goes into designing a UI and presenting a game - or at least there should be. Bad voice-acting will always hurt a good script, but good voice acting might smooth a story's rougher patches out. Is it more important to build a mood, or to keep players engaged? A text-heavy story could benefit from voice acting just as easily as it can be bogged down it. Ambience and traditional music have their place. Knowing the right style of sound is important. It isn't so much that a world should look livable, it needs to sound natural. Sound design also plays an important role in keeping a world believable. A single glance should be enough to inform an audience on what's interactable and what isn't. The point-and-click genre is so exploratory, that information needs to be conveyed properly visually. A cohesive art style takes time to not only develop, but refine. It might not seem like a lot to ask out of a title, but good presentation takes hard work. Visuals need to be comprehensible, the story needs to convey information clearly, and puzzles should make contextual sense. Any story-driven narrative is going to have to pick up the slack outside of the core gameplay loop, and a title where attention to detail is key should logically be able to present itself well. I hope this is the start of a new era in Detective Grimoire’s career, because I wouldn’t mind revisiting this world and gameplay style again soon.Presentation matters for adventure games more than it does for any other genre. The voice acting and standout art and animation fits the distinctive characters very well, and with few exceptions, the puzzles and deduction sequences are engaging and brain-wrinkling. The overall case is somewhat neat and tidy - it won’t take you much more than a few hours to solve the mystery - but the journey along the way is enjoyable. Occasionally the sentences are a little hard to parse out, but once again, the slick hints guide you in the right direction after failure. It’s exceedingly clever and feels very rewarding when you crack the code. This involves completing a sentence by filling in blanks with items or words that further the case. As you talk to suspects and gain clues and hints, every once in a while, a deduction sequence triggers. Then there are the moments of deduction, which are slick and enjoyable. It’s a much more elegant way of doling out hints than the deliberate ones in Layton games. They usually drop you in with little information, but through the solid voice acting, Grimoire or Sally will give you hints as you fail. You’re usually fiddling with logic puzzle constraints, moving around pieces into a specific order, or trying to figure out a tricky solution. While they are nowhere near as numerous as the ones in Professor Layton games, they’re evocative of that style. What I enjoyed the most in Tangle Tower is when you stumble upon a puzzle. A loose hint system that encourages you to search in a specific room or talk to someone is available, which smooths out that potential problem. It’s not always totally clear what you can and can’t interact, which can occasionally lead to frustration, but Tangle Tower gives you a lot of room to explore as well as making it easy to double-back to old rooms as needed. Gameplay involves a lot of frantic tapping or button pressing (using the touch screen is much preferred, but cursor-based button controls are adequate), as you travel from room to room seeking out clues and talking to suspects. Requisite twists and turns abound with the peculiarities of the world and locale helping to contribute to an overall solid mystery. The latest entry follows the previously titular Grimoire and his sidekick Sally as they journey to Tangle Tower to solve the mysterious death of Freya Fellow. Tangle Tower is actually a follow-up to SFB Games’ 2014 mobile and computer point-and-click Detective Grimoire, which in turn owes its origins to a Flash game.
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