This game is SIMPLE TO LEARN. The instructions fit fully on two cards which come packaged with the game. Based on my couple of runs through the tower [Rest in Peace, Eriulf. And cheers to your vengeance, Aldis!] the difficulty is just the right amount of challenging, where some sections may feel easy (such as if you get a Room and an Event which hold flavor text and no challenges back-to-back), and some may feel hard (such as if you get a few DEX challenges in a row on a low-DEX character), but none feel unfair. I will say, I'm a little afraid to try the Hard Mode or the Bigger Tower modes of gameplay, but now that I've played it a bit, I'm already itching to come back and try the tower again.
This game is QUICK! I've played some Solo Journalling Roleplaying Games, which take a lot of time because that's how handwriting works, but I loved that I could sit down with this game at my kitchen table and flip, read, and roll for around half an hour.
This game is EVOCATIVE. The 16-bit art is fantastic, and true to the creator's intent, pays homage to the dungeons of Link to the Past. The flavor text has extremely minor typos here and there, but these are mostly instances of singular words being used where plural ones should be, which suggests to me that it's less about carelessness and more about translation. The author clearly put a lot of thought into the room and event descriptions, and put together with the artwork, each Room card combined with its Event card created a small scene I could fully picture, before imagining my character going to the next room.
This game is INSPIRATIONAL. In addition to everything else outlined above, if you climb the Tower and defeat the Lich in your Solo play, you now have FIVE FLOORS' worth of mysterious rooms, puzzles, traps, and items, plus a BOSS at the end with moves based on the cards you flip! If you're a DM in a TTRPG game, you can take your Tower and use it to outline a Dungeon for your players. If I'm being honest, I bought this game with the hopes that I could use it for this purpose, and now that I've received the cards and played the game, I'm absolutely certain that The Tower of the Ice Lich will appear in my tabletop world soon.
|