the tower
welcome to the tower welcome to the tower welcome to the tower welcome to the tower
controls
- arrow keys: walk, interact
- enter: pause menu (choose "options" for volume controls)
the game will autosave your progress each floor
made by pancelor (code, game design, music, dialog) and tally (art, room design, dialog)
pixel art created with tiles from teaceratops and Yelta
built with PICO-8, Aseprite, PX9, and shrinko8
Download
Development log
- 11 months of the towerJun 17, 2023
- post-jam updatesOct 12, 2022
- thoughts about the towerOct 10, 2022
Comments
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I have a problem: when I run this game on the emulator, I just get a black screen! And when I hit pause it's alright.
what emulator, fake-08? this game is only designed to run in the official pico-8. but I’d be interested to hear if fake-08 has enough features now to be able to handle this game
yes, it's fake-08... It just shows a black screen but when you press pause the background is fine.
What a cruel joke the 101st floor is
amazing game
Losing my +95 run several times to the game creating massive lagspikes while you need to have frame precise inputs killed my fun and motivation to continue. I give up, the game beat me and I watch a letsplay of the last 5 floors.
Cool game! I got to the last floor thanks to the pause reset strat. But man, having to reset a 95 hurts...
By the way, floor 97 was bugged for me because the staircase didn't work after I listened to the entire dialogue, and I had to redo floor 96...
Wait, there is lore ?
But, like, does the button even actually do anything?
Really well put together! I love the art style, and the characters are interesting.
It preys on my curiosity
PICO8 devs are made different lol
It was excruciatingly painful, but I made it to floor 100. Even with the cartridge exploit it was still hard! Making it to the top was worth it though. I'll probably remember this game for a long time.
I really love the atmosphere you've created!
llevo 3 horas jugadas y voy por el 64 como maximo.¿como van ustedes?
Well, I made it to 100, thanks to the pause / savescum glitch people mentioned earlier on. It's interesting, I feel like the design must have been intentional in that regard, because the game is still very tricky when taking advantage of it once you get past around floor 75. You have only a very short time to pause it before you get autosave locked into going up or down, and then at very high levels the period is even shorter. Past 89 you have this problem where if you pause with the first digit presented, you don't really have enough time to repause and you don't know if it's actually higher than your current number or not. Sometimes you roll a single digit, too, and it ends early so if you were timing to pause after two digits it's too late and you have to go back down. It's pretty interesting how that works.
I had to turn the VFX off because they make the savescum glitch much more difficult, but even without that you still have the crazy room glitching that randomly can remove stair or put rocks in front of you. On the last floor even I ceased to exist after a while.
Of course, the game is secretly fairly kind in a manner of speaking, in that it provides you with free floors - there's several scattered through that don't have a required roll at all, especially in the last fourth. You can never be forced to go back down through a floor without a required roll, because you can always just go back up from there. So it's sort of like a save system. Still, the middle floors were agonizing enough to try fairly, so I can't imagine that it actually makes things much easier when you're trying to get very low numbers in a row like the 90s. The nature of floors 93 and 99 makes them easier than you might expect, but I think the hardest part of the game is probably the path from 94-96, where you have to get 3 minuscule percents in a row. I haven't tried going back down yet, which may be even harder. The most obnoxious floors are probably 58 and 59, which you'll be seeing a lot of, due to their winding nature.
My favorite characters are the guy trying to build his own staircase, fell off the bridge, the duel to the death, the height researcher, the person trying to start a cooler party on floor 49, and most of all, the old guy who supposedly does the tower twice each morning. I like to believe he exists.
The thing at the end is interesting, I suppose. Rather unique. I wonder if the tower itself is alive?
I went ahead and did the whole tower going down. It turns out that it's actually a lot easier to go down, because if you fail a roll you start at the lower staircase of a previous floor, letting you go down 2 floors without having to roll again. At first it's rather confusing, but it makes sense. You don't get anything for going down afterwards, though.
This is particularly helpful because the exploit seems like it'd become exhausting past floor 11 going down - I don't know if the moment the first digit appears it'd be locked in and autosaved or if you'd have the chance to THINK you rolled a 1 but it was really an 11 or something. Either way, because you never have to double roll going down, it's easy to descend by simply looping back and forth and bashing your head against a single random number.
At first I thought that we'd be trapped in the tower, because the first rock obviously is impossible to fail (the lowest roll is 1, it passes on 1+) but I suppose that either way it would have disappeared regardless. However, since you start at the beginning of each floor when descending after a failed roll, you just need to fail the roll in floor 2 anyway (the hardest roll in the game, because floor 99 works with either 99 or 100) and you'll make it down.
I went ahead and turned the vfx back on a few times out of curiosity. The vfx seem to get much worse as you go higher, to a startling degree, along with probably the music effects? It's pretty interesting.
My favorite floors are: 99, 96, 93, 90, 88, the 81-83 complex, 78, 76, 69, 61, 58, 49, 45, 40, 37, 34, 33, 32, 24, 22, 20, 14, 11, 8, and 2.
It reminds me of laddering on a competitive game.
Here are my names for every floor.
1 - THE TOWER (1)
2 - the broken one's hallway (1)
3 - in the park
4 - read with the kitty
5 - read forever
6 - dining room table
7 - kitty cat
8 - the tree?
9 - brickshapes
10 - a nice place (?)
11 - the lamps
12 - denial
13 - where is he
14 - the pet rocks
15 - better than home
16 - me and my puppy
17 - sad grove (1)
18 - ice cream
19 - the library
20 - stained glass
21 - the looping escapee
22 - the liar
23 - the twin stones
24 - the bone ponderers
25 - hanging out
26 - minesweeper
27 - the scarecrow
28 - the garden
29 - childhood dreams
30 - fenced
31 - i can see my house from here
32 - research
33 - welcome to the bathroom
34 - the menagerie
35 - renovations
36 - free, the ruined room
37 - the midnight witch
38 - green shoal
39 - pink shoal
40 - ran out of water
41 - the beach
42 - hopeful
43 - the exhausted travelers
44 - vampires
45 - free, mermaid
46 - picasso
47 - the prisoner
48 - spooky
49 - the cooler party (some day)
50 - the party
51 - the outcasts
52 - cow
53 - just one more
54 - cuppatea
55 - THE BUTTON
56 - hall of spades
57 - interred
58 - the gremlin
59 - the snake
60 - gone batty
61 - smartest guy here
62 - pink bedroom
63 - false exploit
64 - magic show
65 - trash creatures
66 - key to nowhere
67 - it's time
68 - the obsessed
69 - the great and honorable council of highrollers
70 - solitary person
71 - found the frogs
72 - bird's house
73 - a bit too ecstatic
74 - pinker grove
75 - less pink grove
76 - the chill corpse
77 - the travelers
78 - free, battle to the death
79 - thomas the tank engine
80 - lonely
81 - out of luck
82 - the first bridge
83 - the second bridge
84 - THE TOWER (2)
85 - the broken one's hallway (2)
86 - sad grove (2)
87 - empty workyard
88 - free, gravesite
89 - just a rock
90 - free, dipper
91 - rapunzel
92 - stairmaker
93 - dice to drink
94 - resting place
95 - face
96 - moon
97 - free, poor yorick's bricks
98 - house
99 - the great hall of dice
100 - thinking
This might be one of the most exhausting games I’ve ever played. And yet, I kept playing it.
There’s something deeply infuriating about how unfair the title is and you just want to see how far the goddamn tower goes. I was almost enchanted to see what was at the end of the tower. It’s deeply boring, painful, and also beautiful once you realize how committed the game is to this really exhausting ride.
I would definitely recommend it to people interested in how far games can go as storytelling experiences, especially when they are unfun.
I really enjoyed the aesthetics of this game. Very relaxing.
I really love this game and find it really inspiring ! Someone said that this is boring, and honestly this is a bit true but that's what make it so cool ! It challenges your patience
boring!
The vibes are impeccable.
The mood of the game is so cool !
That was incredible. No words.
You forgot to mention it also autosaves after a dice roll and whether or not you go upstairs or downstairs!
Also, why not have more dice rolls in higher floors? Some floors for no reason have more than 1 and can even turn a down staircase well to an upstairs one if it passes the check. It'd make things slightly less frustrating. Seems like such an arbitrary decision.
I seem to have crashed the game on floor 72 (after going back and forth for a while and using the cartridge feature).
Unsure whether this is a bug or a feature lol
Seemingly boring, yet pretty unique and interesting. Well done!
Had the same thing happen on floor 74
Also happened to me on floor 84
I had this occur on floor 81 while performing the pause reset exploit to get past the 60s, I feel like it's probably a random chance.
incredible game. Obsessively pausing during the rolls using the exploit below trapped in the 90s trying to reach the end...
What exploit are you talking about?
Oh, I've got it. You pause as the number is appearing and reset if the number is too low.
Really love the creativity here. Such a simple concept, developed so well. Looks and sounds great too.
I also didn't realise how much I love the bitsy default guy and cat sprites.
Just finished my first playthrough, tough game haha! Loved the rabbit creature person!
Cool game, if anyone is stuck on some of the levels, I did a walkthrough video.
The 80+ floor grind is soulcrushingly brutal.
Am I missing some sort of thing that makes this easier, except for the floors where you can bypass the dice rolling? Or is it really just repeating and repeating until the RNG gods favour you with a ten-streak of 90+ rolls?I'm not really proud of myself here, but I kept messing around with stuff until I realized that if you pause in the exact correct frame just as you get your roll result but before the result changes the level, you can decide whether to reset cartridge or not, based on whether the roll is good enough to get you to the next floor or not, allowing you to just reroll instead of being forced down a floor.
The trick doesn't seem to work with the single digit rolls (1-9) and it's up to you whether you want to take the risk on whether that 1/10 is actually a 100 roll result or not.
Managed to get to floor 100 with the giant blue brain. I assume that's the end?
what if the real 100th floor was the friends we made along the way
Softlocked on 91, a glitch replaced the staircase down with a mug right as i was about to go into it. :(
Going to the pause menu [p] and choosing Reset Cart(ridge) seems to fix the stair glitch. I've had it several times without even getting to 91. XD
Also progress seems to get autosaved, so even if you've left the webpage/closed the downloaded game, you should theoretically still be able to continue from your 91 run, you crazy lucky person. Incidentally that also seems to fix the stair glitch, but it's less convenient than just doing Reset Cartridge.
is there any way to get better luck in this "game?"
post cheat codes here
floor 99... corner of my mind...
I remember when you were convinced you'd found an exploit by doing frame-perfect stair transitions... fun memory
Well done. Didn't thought I would hang in that long. Great dialogs! Reached the 66th floor.
I really love the atmosphere that you've created, but it can get a bit frustrating as you climb higher in the tower. I don't think I'll be able to get much further than the 65th floor without some kind off cheat, it's true. But the graphics and sound remind me of the sort of games they made back in '84.
This is so simple, yet so frustrating. The best/worst part is the insatiable curiosity about what the hell is at the top. I'll save my rating for when I manage to do that for now, I'll resist the urge to kill myself as I circle between levels 41-61. I'll probably drive myself insane, but IWILLDOIT...
p.s
thank you for making this torture. I also like this game's great art and in-between interactions with NPCs.
One of the coolest games I've played in a while. Now that I think about it might go into my top 3 favourite games of all time! Great job devs <3
woah! the gameplay change around floor 54 was a cool twist on the formula
ok buddy
what twist?
I've been going in circles for days.... I just want to leave.