Tower of Mask takes the classic Dungeon Master format and enlivens it with feisty combat
This feels too good to be true! How can it possibly be that I’m about to be the person to tell you there’s a new contender for the Legend of Grimrock throne? How is this not already the talk of the gaming town? Seriously, Tower of Mask is a fantastic Dungeon Master-like with incredible combat, and one that deserves to become very big.
I say “Dungeon Master-like” because as ever, people’s inability to use genre names correctly has rendered “dungeon crawler” to mean any game of any genre that’s set in a dungeon, and “blobber” is too obscure to be useful (and apparently only applies when there’s a party of characters). What I mean is, a tile-based, first-person RPG, with runic writing on the walls, trapdoors in the floor, and cubes of sparkly lights that’ll teleport you somewhere. That’s what we’ve got here, and while the written words (few and far between) are close to gibberish, everything else is completely splendid and I love it. (I should add, this is a Japanese game by developer Papertip Studio, and Japan has its own rich tradition of this genre about which I’m wildly ignorant, so forgive me for my entirely Western perspective on this throughout.)
Tower of Mask is a single-character game, and there’s no magic nor potion mixing. And yeah, I miss having a team and I miss making health potions, but it turns out, I absolutely do not miss the panic of trying to stammer out runes to craft a spell in the madness of battle. And that’s because what Tower of Mask does so splendidly well is make combat feel alive and real-time, in a tile-based game.
Because you’re a party of one, your weapon is visibly held in front of you, swung according to its own properties and the skills of your character, and can make contact if in reach of an enemy. This means that if you’re holding a lengthy staff (none of that, thank you), you can poke enemies from two tiles away, and it also means you can catch baddies on the diagonal. This makes the tile-dodging combat of the genre so much more lively, really embracing the way most people game the genre’s battles by sidestepping from attacks, then sidestepping again to deliver blows.
Each enemy type has a different ghastly mask that determines their abilities, and each requires a unique approach to fight safely. There are those who can use ranged fire attacks, those that swish little swords at a rapid pace, and–oh god–those who can ghoulishly vanish, then jump-scare appear right in front of you as they scream and hit. Eek! Those last ones are brilliant, and fortunately, quite easy to kill. Others take a proper beating, and given your weapons degrade with use, this all requires lots of careful balancing.
It’s also all made easier by the amazing movement. You have a completely free mouse-look, letting you look around as if in an FPS—it’s only movement where you are tile-bound. But this is all so smooth that you can whizz around and barely feel like you’re laboriously turning 90 degrees on the spot in that stilted fashion, even though you are. Trust me, it just works, and it’s how every blobber should be from now on. And talking of new rules for the genre, the way you can throw items must be immediately adopted too! When you hold to throw something, an arched dotted line appears showing you where it will land, adjusting as you aim. So yes, at last, a Dungeon Master-like where you can accurately throw a stone onto a distant pressure plate! Game changing.
You have three item slots and three weapon slots that can be selected from on the fly, then three armour spots and six accessory slots for bonus items. Beyond that, at the start of the game your inventory is teeny, your spaces for carrying spares of torches, weapons, health potions and the like very limited. But this expands with every new bag you find on your travels. Often these are rewards for finding secret passages, or exploring out of the way, and each one feels like such a win, suddenly giving you two more inventory spaces for lugging about everything you could need.
To balance this limitation (and of course it’s even less space than usual, given you’ve only one character), the save fountains found in levels are accompanied by magic chests that have loads of storage, and work like a Diablo stash or a Resident Evil item box, where your spare equipment appears in all of them.
The puzzles are great, there are hidden switches all over the walls, and it all feels so comfortable to play. Yes, I with that ranged combat were a bigger feature (you get magic weapons, but in the first four levels there’s no sign of a bow or arrow). Health potions are perfectly distributed, infrequent enough to force you to worry and squeak around on low health, then find one just in the nick of time—but I do miss being able to mix my own. Yet this is such a solid, excellent example of the genre, complete with its own sensibilities, ideas, and such brilliant movement, that I’m delighted that it exists at all, rather than being especially bothered by anything missing.
If you’re not completely sure, there’s a demo available that’ll give you a taste of its slick tile-based movement, nifty combat, and unique approach to inventory juggling. But I’d strongly suggest grabbing this and jumping right in. It’s been a bewildering 10 years since Legend of Grimrock 2 was released, and until now nothing else has stepped in to satisfactorily pick up its mantle. Tower of Mask may not be quite at Grimrock’s level of mastery, but it’s a properly good time in a much underserved genre.
This review originally appeared on Buried Treasure. If you want to support the site’s efforts to bring awareness to otherwise ignored indie games, you may want to support its Patreon.
