The Tower of Beatrice is developed and published by Fairy Forest, playing as an ‘escape the room’ puzzle-type adventure game that will set you back around a fiver. It’s explored in a first person point and click style, similar to titles like Myst.
You play as a theif who infiltrates Beatrice’s Tower to steal her alchemic spell book in order to complete your contract with a mysterious individual… When you grab the book, however, all is not as it seems you’re instantly locked in a cage, and Beatrice herself starts talking to you from within the pages.
From here, you have to work your way down the tower room by room. There are six floors that you need to escape, and each floor has its own unique personality and design – Ontop of all this, there are tons of unique and different puzzles to work through! There are also lots of adorable characters to meet along the way, who offer charming and funny dialogue throughout.
The characters you meet along the way are really my favourite part of the whole game, in particular the adorable little Granny Spider; she’s just so wholesome. My biggest tip for the game is to read everything and pay attention to the dialogue – A lot of the time hints are given to the player to help the solve various puzzles, but they can be pretty well hidden! My second tip is, as with all escape the room style games, have a notebook at hand so you can right down important stuff; this basically just saves you the hassle of constantly navigating between two parts of the screen.
Unfortunately navigation can be clunky and frustrating on the console version, although it makes it slightly easier to find where you have to click, you have to cycle through allllll the options before clicking where you want to go, whereas if this game had kept the cursor for the console version, the controls would have worked out much better in my opinion. The game itself is pretty much impossible to lose, as with most point and click games, as enough clicking around will eventually lead you to what you need to do – It’s working out the order of clicking around that’s harder.
…Luckily if you get stuck, you can bring up some helpful hints that basically tell you exactly what you need to do in an area, which is super helpful when you’re in a clicking circle nightmare. The puzzles themselves range from really easy to much much harder – There does appear to be some glitches with some of the puzzles however, as some I solved ended up not corresponding to the clue, or just making no sense in general… But it didn’t really matter all that much in the end as I never had my progression blocked. What’s nice though is that if you solve some of the puzzles out of the expected order, the developers have coded in dialogue for that to reward you.
My first playthrough took me about 4 hours; considering I don’t really play many of these types of games, perhaps that’s why it took me so long – Second playthrough however lasted about an hour and a half. So if you’re really good at these types of games, you’re probably looking at around 2 to 3 hours of gameplay… Which isn’t too bad for a fiver. Unfortunately though as it is with these types of games, there isn’t really much replayability. There are apparently lots of pop culture references throughout the game, but I was either too distracted by the puzzles, or I just simply haven’t played or watched the right things to understand the references.
Overall this is a charming little puzzle game with an amusing story and characters that I would recommend for anyone who either wants to play something short and sweet, or wants an easy Platinum. Unfortunately the game’s controls and a couple of the weird puzzle glitches do set it back a little, but the overall enjoyment is still there. I’d rate it a: