[Rerun] Nominee: Tangle Tower

Presenting the 2020 IndieCade Nominees: Tangle Tower

Tangle Tower is a murder-mystery detective adventure game! Unravel a thrilling mystery by exploring a strange and twisted mansion, discovering curious clues, interrogating peculiar suspects and solving unique puzzles.

In the game, playing as a pair of detectives named Grimoire and Sally, you’re free to move between the many areas of the house and gardens, each with a detailed, digitally painted background.

Sometimes you’ll find clues to add to your case file, sometimes you’ll find a puzzle to solve — which usually means one of the suspects is trying to hide something.

The suspects themselves are the primary focus of the game. There are eight in total, each is fully animated and voice acted. Your job is to discover which one of them murdered the young artist Freya Fellow. You can talk to the suspects about a large array of subjects — of course, there is some essential information to collect, such as each suspect’s statement of what they were doing during the murder. But perhaps you’ll actually learn more by asking the suspects about any one of the clues you’ve collected, or asking them about each other — most of them are related, so it seems likely that they’ve formed pretty strong opinions of each other¦

Everyone living at Tangle Tower has a secret or two. You’ll slowly unravel a much larger story surrounding the murder mystery, dealing with themes of family lineage, isolation, living up to expectations, and the search for personal freedom.

In terms on genre, our primary inspirations were the Ace Attorney series and the Professor Layton series — character-driven mystery stories with elements of traditional point-and-click interactions.

As for the tone, I like to think of it as a classic adventure story — not too dissimilar from something you might find in a Tintin comic.