Tower of Time has been on my list of things to play for a while. It was free on GOG a while back, and I just never got around to it. Then my motherboard died and I forgot to reinstall it. When it came around for Switch, I figured I’d been meaning to play it so I should give it a go.
Created by Event Horizon and published by Digerati, Tower of Time puts you into the shoes of a fantasy story villager who explores the forbidden glowing tower near his home as a small child. Within, he is told that a great fate awaits him but not yet. He grows up, leaves the village, and it withers and dies while he rises through the ranks of soldiers in the service of his king. Eventually, the kingdom is in dire peril and he is given leave by his liege to investigate the tower in the hopes it may save the kingdom.
I know, it’s a lot to chew on and a bit cliche, but it’s actually a decent story. Not spectacular, mind you, but solid and interesting. You have no character choice and stay anonymous but that’s not really relevant to the game itself, surprisingly. You return to the tower with two of your most trusted lieutenants, a fighter and an archer, to revisit the room you made your way to as a child. Since you’re too good to fight your way down, you send your subordinates and that’s where things take a bit of a turn.
This is the beginning of the actual gameplay and it’s where everything immediately goes wrong on the Switch. I get that this is a PC conversion, but it’s easily one of the worst conversions I’ve ever seen. My first playthrough ended up with me losing both characters because I was literally unable to select my character and move them during real-time combat, since the tutorial doesn’t even bother to tell you how to move characters. In case you’re wondering, it’s actually L + R together with the stick on the Switch, something I was only able to find out through trial and error. My fighter had healing abilities, dash attacks, and the ability to instantly erect rock walls to block enemy fire and attacks, but I was unable to activate any of these abilities with any regularity in any playthrough of the game on the Switch.
This is the problem with porting PC games to a console. It’s hard to distill a complex game that’s designed around a keyboard with over a hundred keys and the ability to bind keys down to to a controller that, in the Switch’s case, has 10 buttons and two sticks with button functions, along with a D pad. That’s 16 choices, assuming you don’t combine buttons, and the designers of Tower of Time most certainly did. For example, to access the inventory, you have to hold down R, then use the right stick to highlight your inventory on the selection wheel, then let go of R and hit L, then release L while you’re still holding the stick to highlight inventory. On the PC version of Tower of Time, you can either hit the ‘I’ key or click on it with the mouse. Any every major control in Tower of Time is just as utterly mystifying. It’s hard to pick up items and you have to double click everything. Your on-screen cursor is slow. It’s nearly impossible to select spells on the fly. The game is an absolute nightmare to control, and that’s in exploration mode as well as combat mode. It was honestly a miracle that I survived the first two combats on normal on the Switch, and that’s with one of my party getting killed.
Sure, there’s a variety of player characters available, a wide variety of enemies, and an interesting storyline to keep you busy. But if you don’t have a broken controller by the time you’ve clocked your first hour with Tower of Time, I’ll be surprised. I’d love to think it was me just being judgmental too, but it just so happens that I have a digital copy of Tower of Time on my GOG account and I figured I’d install it and give it a whirl! Turns out the game is downright awesome when it’s played on a PC! Everything flows smoothly, movement is straightforward and combat is a challenging delight. It’s entirely in the interface that the problem lies on the Switch. Simply put, Tower of Time is virtually unplayable with the Switch controls. It’s nonsensical, non-intuitive, and utterly frustrating, while the game itself is a solid dungeon explorer that’s interesting and fun and I’d love to play it. In point of fact, I’ve already gotten further in the game in 30 minutes on the PC than I did in over two hours on the Switch. It’s a refined, awesome game.
Mechanically, the design of Towers of Time is great. You’re managing multiple party members in real-time, able to pause the action, selecting attacks and special attacks, magic, and so-on, able to coordinate attacks between characters, and all in a relatively short period of time. There’s upgrading, a variety of equipment, moral choices to be made, and even the enemy design is interesting right from the get-go. It’s a finely-tuned machine that works well on PC and has a lot of solid design elements in the combat. Story elements are solid, the characters, background, and backstory are interesting, and everything about it exudes quality. It just doesn’t transfer over to the Switch at all, in any way.
I don’t know whether Event Horizon themselves ported Tower of Time to the Switch or whether Digerati did, but whoever was responsible for the monstrosity that is the control layout in the game should simply be fired. Holding multiple buttons to activate things is a nightmare in the best of times, and wheels like the ones that pop up during gameplay on the Switch are what ruined great games like Neverwinter Nights and Baldur’s Gate on the Switch, two other PC games we recently reviewed that are incredibly great on the PC but simply don’t translate all that well to console play. I don’t understand why developers keep thinking complex PC games can be ported easily to consoles to make a few extra bucks, but they’re dead wrong.
Visually, Tower of Time is solid, although the fixed camera is incredibly dated and irritating and the zoom really doesn’t give you an idea of whether the character models are all that detailed. These are minor issues but mildly irritating for a modern title. Have some faith in your character models and give us an open camera and zoom, guys! The music is simple yet elegant and enjoyable, and the overall premise of the game is good. I love the idea of controlling living avatars from my crystal throne room, even if it does raise some disturbing philosophical questions that the game does manage to address at least in part. The gameplay is fun, but it was honestly so hard to get anywhere that I found it impossible to progress in the Switch version of the game.
Is Tower of Time worth playing? Absolutely and without a doubt! Should you buy it for the Switch, even if you don’t have access to a PC? Absolutely not. This is one game that is designed from the ground up for PC and should never have been ported to consoles. The port is a blatant money grab, and even that would be fine if the controls were remotely intuitive at all, but instead they require patience, memorization, and a ridiculous amount of attention to even get a character to use his or her weapon. That pretty much slaughters any fun factor that Tower of Time manages to establish and relegates it to a piece of shovelware on the scrapheap of the Nintendo eShop.
That last sentence honestly makes me more than a little sad. I really like Tower of Time. I’ll definitely be playing more of it on the PC. It’s a fun game that’s worthwhile and fits well into the vein of titles like Torment: Tides of Numenera, Pillars of Eternity, and Divinity: Original Sin 2 (though it isn’t quite up to those standards in terms of plot development). However, it’s a solid indie title in that vein and it’s a shame that anyone who plays it on the Switch will likely disregard it entirely. If you get a chance and you like top down story-based dungeon crawlers, you should definitely check out Towers of Time. Just don’t get it for the Nintendo Switch, as calling it a hot mess there would be generous at best.
This review was based on a digital copy of Towers of Time provided by the publisher. It was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes and was equally unplayable on both. All screenshots are from actual gameplay. Towers of Time is also available for GOG, Steam, PS4, and Xbox One as, and you should definitely play it on a PC. Seriously. It’s pretty great. Just please avoid the console versions!