Twisted Tower arms you entirely out of the gift shop

You climb an abandoned 1950s resort called the Twisted Tower, floor by floor, through five themed attractions — a hotel, a waterpark, a clown casino, a carnival forest and a space station. The mascots that used to work here are still on shift and no longer friendly. The stated goal is the top of the building and the person waiting at it; the stated obstacle is every fairy-tale character the park ever printed on a poster.

The unusual part is what you are holding. There is no military catalogue in here. The weapons are midway prizes and novelty-store stock: a whack-a-mole mallet, a rubber-band pistol, a dart-throwing Tommy gun, a shotgun that farts, a chain-gun that spits bubblegum, a sniper slingshot, a ray gun that pops skulls. You upgrade that arsenal as you climb, and the traversal kit works the same way — bizarre toys you collect and then use to jump, dash and grapple higher up the shaft.

That constraint does more work than it looks like it does. A weapon drawn from the fiction of a place has to earn its slot twice, once as a joke and once as a job. A rubber-band pistol is funny for about four seconds. After that it is either a cheap, precise, fast-firing sidearm you actually reach for, or it is dead weight you switch away from and never come back to.

The route is not fixed either. The game offers a variety of paths per playthrough, so the tower you climbed is not quite the one someone else describes. That is a structural promise as much as a replay one: it means no single corridor can be the one place where the story is allowed to happen.

Why We Remember Bioshock’s Fort Frolic is the essay the store page is reaching for when it name-checks BioShock. Its argument is that Fort Frolic sticks because one authored personality runs the entire district, so exploring it, fighting through it and even sparing things in it are all part of the same man’s show. An abandoned resort works on exactly that principle or it does not work at all. The tower needs a proprietor whose taste explains why a waterpark, a clown casino and a space station ended up in one building.

How Level Design Can Tell a Story covers the other half: rooms, routes, props and light are how a world explains itself and how the player gets cast in a role. Twisted Tower is promising a mysterious, emotional story about your own past, delivered while you are sprinting upstairs shooting things. Almost none of that can travel by dialogue. It has to be in the state of the rooms — what was abandoned mid-shift, what got boarded over, which ride somebody kept running long after the lights went out.

What Makes a Good Combat System? is the test the toys have to pass. Strong combat is a stack of small live decisions: who to hit first, where to stand, which tool fits this moment, when to commit. Seven novelty weapons clear that bar if the mallet, the slingshot and the bubblegum chain-gun each answer a different question the room is asking. They fail it if they turn out to be one gun in seven costumes, which is the specific failure a heavily themed arsenal invites.

Twisted Tower is by [Atmos Games](http://atmosgames.com/), published by 3D Realms, out now on Windows, filed under Action, Adventure and Indie. It is single-player, with full controller support, adjustable difficulty, and a set of comfort options — camera comfort, contrast controls, no timed inputs, custom volume — that suggest somebody thought about who else might want to climb this thing.

Five levels is a short, deliberate shape rather than an open world, and the branching paths are what has to carry a second run. That is an honest structure for a small team with a publisher behind it: build fewer rooms, and make each one worth walking through twice.

If the appeal is a place wearing a story it did not start with, Saci: Son of the Wind is the other one on this list — folklore on the surface, and underneath it a specific human history the building has been keeping the whole time.