TANGLE TOWER
Format iOS, PC, Switch Developer/publisher SFB Games Origin UK Release 2019
Our interest in delving into the making of Tangle Tower stems largely from one thing: the sheer luxuriousness of it. From the sumptuously drawn backgrounds to its snappy script, detailed animation, vibrant designs, rich soundtrack and award-winning vocal performances, everything in this murder mystery visual novel is presented immaculately. How has indie outfit SFB Games achieved it? One look at the folder of sketches and notes we receive, full to bursting with flowcharts, scribbles and iteration upon iteration of character designs gives us our answer. They probably didn’t need to do all this, we suggest, although that is exactly what makes the game so striking. “Scope?” technical director Tom Vian grins at us. “What’s scope?”
Tangle Tower is far from a large game: all of the action takes place within the single, titular building, and although you’re free to explore the place and talk to suspects at your leisure, the story is a linear affair wrapped up in just five or six hours. But the attention to detail is lavishly applied, with all dialogue fully voiced, and each character responding with their own unique thoughts when presented with evidence – feats even beyond the reach of the Ace Attorney games. The secret was not as dramatic as mortgaging houses or surviving on cheap cuts of meat (the most precarious the food situation ever got, art director Catherine Unger jokes, was that “some days we couldn’t decide what to have for lunch”). Instead, it was a focused concept, and a brilliant custom pipeline through which everything flowed, that fuelled this small team’s desire to live up to one anothers’ standards.
The game’s lead, Grimoire himself, had been kicking about for a while already: SFB Games released Flash-based point-and-click murder back in 2014. “That one has, like, a slight cliffhanger ending,” creative director says. ”I don’t think we were immediately planning on making a sequel – I just liked the idea of coming back to it. It’s more fun to write mythology when you’ve got a sense of some bigger secrets going on in the background. So we had this strange potential world to dive into.”
