Sometimes you see a game, you simply have to try, and Tower Princess was one of these games.

Tower Princess is a parody to the very cliché fairy tale concept. A young brave knight, rarely referred to by name, saving a kidnapped princess. The game was meant to be as cliché as possible on this point and yet giving this all a few crazy twists that can work out really funny.

Take the unreal engine to work things out, and boom, we got a way to go.

Well, where do you find these princesses? Well, in a cliché game there is only one place to go, in a dungeon, and as clichés dictate, it's filled with deadly traps all over the place. Does this make the game boring? Of course not! Some traps are actually funny, but still challenging to work your way through. The game uses a typical WASD controlled system in combination with the mouse, and when you press tab, the controls are explained (oh, you need "dodge" to get under that small gap in the door. Took me hours to figure out, as that wasn't really obvious), when you press TAB. Although I do own a Logitec gamepad (the model looking like a PlayStation controller), I haven't tried if there's gamepad control, if there isn't it should make a nice addition to the game to add it, but frankly I don't know.

As the game is meant as a parody, and a parody to the clichés in fairy tale and classic games, some approaches to several things were needed. Making a parody is not exactly an easy feat. The graphic presentation of this game was pretty good, and the cell shaded game objects give the game a cartoonish mood, which was as far as this game was concerned a good thing. The music also makes the game interesting. Now the demo only features one princess to save, as where the full game features more of them, and the princess I found was a zombie princess addicted to eating brains. The typical zombie cliché, but not a cliché you expect with the princess cliché, and as such game strikes another well though-out thing. Combining clichés in order to create something original and yet still being cliché.... You still follow... The music also creates the right tension, and the gameplay is challenging, and yet it's not too hard (at least not if you've played 3D platform games before), and therefore the game is amusing in both a laugh and both a a game that is nice to play, as since this is still a computer game, the gameplay is most important, and the developers didn't neglect to focus on that. At some spots you really may need to puzzle a few things out.

There was one thing I didn't quite get and that was this:

There was a timer on which way too little time to finish the demo level in, and yet when the timer reaches 0, it continues to count in 0-xx seconds, and keeps going on forever. Was that a bug? Or was the timer a scrapped idea never properly removed? What was the purpose here?

The most special moment of course, the moment where we actually get to save the first princess. What is important to note (yeah, this doesn't sound pretty respectful) as that the princess you save count as inventory objects... or maybe I should say, their presence gives you a kind of item you can use in combat in your benefit... It does have a cooldown time when you use that item though. As clichés go, there is room for those impossible feats never explained. If you get in areas where you have to jump and run over all kinds of obstacles and traps, the princess stays behind, only to pop up in the next room, with no proper explanation how she got there. That completely fills the picture, and maybe it was just a technical thing that was lazily covered this way (I'm a coder too, you know, so I know my tricks), in the way this game has been set up it all works out. (Well if you look well, you can see she can use the those mysterious pads you find along the way. Still a mystery, why you can't use them, while the princess can, so the code "cheat" thing was still in tact... No explanation... Not needed, also).

If you never played a 3D platform game before, this game can be bothersome, although I don't know how the full game's gonna be. The game doesn't start easy in order to let you learn as you go. The game does provide a load of tutorials, but knowing what features do, so something different than really mastering the game. This can make the game pretty frustrating to players who are new to this genre, and they might toss the game away easily because of that. For the more experienced 3D platform game fan, this game can work out fine because of that, due to their experiences with past games, which was for me the reason I could get through the demo relatively quickly. Perhaps the game could also work out with multiple difficulty skills (which the demo at least doesn't have) to attract both beginners, casual gamers and those people who whine about games being too easy, and who are just mental masochists.

What I hated was the way the demo ends.... Just when the game was offering a big challenge the Zombie Princess told me the demo was over and congratulated me..... Speaking of an anti-climax....

Now it needs to be noted that the demo I played was not just a free demo for a game I suspect to be paid when the full version comes out, but the game was also still in development. So some points I noted in this review may turn out entirely different in the full game. What I've seen so far looks really really promising.

This game was created by: @Tower_Princess
On Game Jolt you can find the game here
Or check out their page on Steam
Or check out their website: http://www.towerprincess.com/