I recently discovered a real gem of an
RPG on Sony's PSN Store. Thankfully, I saw this game being talked
about online in social media, because otherwise, I might not have
found it. Sony made a mistake and listed the release date a month
earlier than when it actually released, so you'll have to search
“Tower of Time” to find it. But please do, this RPG is incredible
and well worth your money and time! This is Event Horizon's first
game, and although it seems to have somehow slipped beneath the radar
of many game reviewers, I think it more than deserves a lot of
attention. Please support this indie developer so they'll keep making
games for us. The Tower of Time is, in my opinion, an RPG
masterpiece!
SETTING
From the very opening of the game, a
powerful atmosphere was set through foreboding music and the
protagonist's voice-acted narrative. Mood is thick throughout the
game, and it never relents—there is a pervasive, almost chilling
weight to everything as you play, with a pacing that creeps forward
and never feels rushed, but still carries with it an urgency and a
gravity that keeps you exploring. I loved the story, but I won't
spoil it so you can experience it first hand. I'll just say that the
method through which the protagonist (you) is able to observe and
participate in the tower exploration is novel and ingenious. The
tower has an almost palpable feeling of depth and history. You will
honestly feel like you're exploring something vast and ancient as you
advance through every floor of the mysterious tower.
The environments were all beautifully
crafted, with excellent color, detail, lighting, and shadows. Parts
of the surroundings that weren't accessible but were still visible
raised questions about the tower I was exploring. For example, wooden
tracks for a mine cart wound around down into the darkness, making me
wonder where they went, what were they used for, and who made them? I
often found myself moving around the edges of a platform to see if I
could get a better look down into the tower's depths and possibly
answer some of those questions for myself. I was left wondering at
some of the mysteries this place was hiding, though I have found that
through a bit of exploring and secret door discovery, some of these
questions can be answered.
I really loved the small history bits
scattered throughout the environment. Ancient texts, journals, or
letters mentioned a lost society (ours), and described it from an
outsider's point of view. For example a description of an airplane
was seen as a giant metal bird people sat inside like a ship. My
fighter character concluded that “surely it must be a book of
children's tales.”
CHARACTERS AND RPG ELEMENTS
The characters you begin with are set—a
fighter and an archer—so you don't get to build any characters from
the ground up. However, as they explore and advance in level, you can
customize them by distributing 3 attribute points each level among 4 attributes.
You can also customize at each level with points that you can also
assign to battle-oriented skills, such as healing, dash, erect wall,
teleport, fire arrows, or even summoning. The skills each have 2
options to develop, but you may only choose one for each level of the
skill, which definitely allows for increased customization. For
example, the fighter's Dash skill has 2 choices: the left choice
reduces the skill's cooldown and mana cost (which affords you more
mobility and greater threat generation), and the right choice
increases the radius of impact, damage, and adds gravity pull, as
well as interrupting enemy casting. At the beginning, you will only
have 3 different skills available per character, but as they level
up, other skills will be unlocked for point investment.
SOUND
The sound effects were really
impressive, and made the experience incredibly immersive. I'd highly
recommend playing the game with a stereo headset or through a
surround-sound system. Rocks falling, wood creaking, water dripping,
and burning torches all come together to create a very realistic
feeling of isolated exploration, but the infrequent sound of magic
activating through various devices you discover throughout your
adventure will shock you into remembering the mystical nature of the
game. The music was excellent and added to increase the mood,
creating a subtle urgency to your mission that felt like a slowly
building but ever-present crescendo. I truly felt like the tower was
timeless—it had a personality and presence of its own that felt
decidedly ancient.
BATTLE
Although it took a little acclimation,
I adjusted quickly to the battle system and quickly grew to love it. It
almost appears as if everything is moving in slight slow motion, but
the pacing is absolutely perfect. I often paused the battle to issue
new commands and change tactics, selecting new spells and abilities
because of the constantly changing situation. Just when I thought
that positioning my archer far away from the oncoming undead was the
best tactic after sending my fighter into the front lines, I noticed
that the undead were also beginning to swarm in from another location
behind the archer. I quickly had to cease firing and back her up
closer to the fighter with her back to the undead he was
demolishing—just so she had a chance to deal with the three that
were fast approaching her from the other side.
One thing I particularly liked about
the battle system was that it let you know where the battles would
be, and what you'd be fighting if you decided to engage. Your
characters explore a beautifully detailed environment, but instead of
random, unseen encounters or automatically spawned enemies, you'll
see them standing there in the environment, waiting for you, blocking
your way forward. If you approach them, they'll slightly approach you
until contact, and then you'll see a list of each of the monsters in
that group. You can look at each monster, and even read up on their
abilities, before deciding whether or not you want to fight them. If
you choose “withdraw,” that's simply all that happens—no battle
will begin, and they will still be standing there later, blocking
your way while ready to fight.
The enemies themselves all have very
interesting tactical skills. For example, “Kill Command” raises
your threat and other enemies focus on you. Field of armor improves
armor to enemies in that aura range and overlaps with others that
have the same skill, making two enemies with the skill extremely
difficult to destroy. Life drain from a distance heals magi spirits,
and it's honestly panic-inducing when you see these undead shining
their beam onto your character, drinking his or her life away while
repairing all the damage you've done to them.
The battles are challenging, and
sometimes, they are too hard. This is fine, though, because if you
fail, you are given the option to retry, or load from a previous
save. Sometimes I'd come across a group that was just too tough to
fight, so I'd leave and explore some more, hopefully leveling up my
characters a little more, or maybe adjusting their abilities instead
so that I could better manage the battle. Once in a while, there are
isolated enemies that were definitely above my level, so I saved them
for the very end before taking them on again. It's amazing the
difference that it made when 1 or 2 characters leveled up once. The
game feels balanced towards being consistently challenging, but never
impossible.
TREASURE, CRAFTING, AND TOWN BUILDINGS
Treasure was scattered about through
the tower and I was also picking up little piles of gold or opening
treasure chests. Treasure included items in the basic categories:
weapons, chest armor, leg armor, boots, gloves, helmets, amulets, and
rings. Often, I found versions of the same that were just slightly
better than what I had, or slightly worse. The amount of treasure
items felt right, though—it was nothing like Diablo where you spend
half of your game in inventory management. The treasure in the Tower
of Time was enough to keep me going, but never too much to be
distracting.
After every battle there was always a
small reward of items, gold, and/or crafting materials. Crafting
materials allowed me to create new items if I wanted to improve upon
what I had (or try something different), and when I had the crystals
I needed, I could even imbue them with small enchantments. The
crafting system was not overly complex, but it was still enough that
I could customize my items to fit my playstyle. Again, it didn't
detract from the game and never kept me away from exploring for very
long.
Eventually the option opens up to go back to town, where you'll find various buildings such as the
armory, mage tower, keep, barracks, and library. You can upgrade
these buildings with enough gold, which will open up more options for
your party. When your characters level up, you actually need to pay
some gold to train them up to the next level. As the story unfolds
and you discover certain blueprints to upgrade your buildings, you
can begin to recruit new characters to your party as well. The first
was a druid, and he was a very needed and welcome addition to my
party.
CHARACTER INTERACTION
The writing and voice-acting in Tower
of Time is top-tier: I can't imagine how it could be any better. I
really enjoyed the conversations between my two initial explorers,
who both have very different mindsets. Character alignment is
affected by the choices you make, and though I haven't played far
enough, I do suspect that the negative effects in alignment may
become problematic for the party as a whole. In one example, I
discovered a strange statue that spoke. It asked for a sacrifice of
life, and I later discovered a tree branch and a small frog. When
returning to the statue, I had the option to offer one of these, but
my fighter, Kane, thought of a third option—sacrifice his own blood
to the statue. The archer, Maeve, is very opposed to this idea. I
won't spoil anything by sharing the results of the sacrifice, but if
you do it, Maeve's alignment adjusts negatively by 1, where it
improves by 1 if you do one of the other two options. Each character suffers negative or positive effects, depending on where they are in the alignment chart. For instance, the druid might suffer a small penalty to mana regeneration if he is unhappy.
MECHANICS
The only flaw I might mention is that
the interface in this game felt counter-intuitive at times. I still
have the habit of trying to move back in a menu by clicking O, only
to remember once again that it closes every menu still open and
brings me back to the game. Holding down R2 while selecting an item
off the radial with the stick, then releasing R2 to select it also
felt a bit odd, but I did get used to it. It would have also been
nice to have a less round-about way to pull up the map. This game was
originally designed for PC, so it's understandable that something
might have been lost in translation to consoles.
One thing I loved and should be a
standard in ALL RPG's was the save-anywhere feature that saved so
quickly I sometimes had to do it again because I couldn't believe it
was over already. You only have 5 different save slots, but that's
fine—I just moved through 1-5 and repeated that process with each
progressive save.
OVERALL
I have only put about 6 hours into the
game so far, but so far I am enjoying this much more than any other
RPG I've played on a console (and I've played A LOT of them.) I
honestly look forward to finding an hour or two during the week where
I can delve into the deep atmosphere of Tower of Time and completely
lose myself, never being in a hurry but always enjoying every aspect
of the immersive exploration. Note that I rarely stop to read the extras in
RPG's because they just feel tacked-on for the compulsive-gamer
types. With Tower of Time, however, I really must know more about
what happened there and why things are the way they are. Every bit of
text I discover is a step closer to learning more about the story,
the history, and the people involved. Everything about this game
feels deep and vast. I am totally and completely hooked.
FINAL SCORE: 97/100
An excellent masterpiece and a
must-buy, for only $25!
