A detective point-and-click adventure game with a quality voiceover cast, coupled with beautiful hand drawn art and animation.

A nice variety of puzzles throughout, with a clever system which gives the player freedom to piece together deductions from the myriad of statements and evidence.

Unlike 'L.A. Noire' with its focus on catching suspects in a lie under questioning, Tangle Tower is more akin to 'Kathy Rain' and places an onus on showing you all the pieces before challenging you to put them together.

The light-hearted banter between the investigative duo and their encouragement/nudging when you are close to a solution, are both great ways in which this game helps bring out the best detective in you without handing you the answers directly.

Overall, an enticing puzzle box that wants you to savour picking the lock.

An astoundingly delightful mystery adventure follow-up to Detective Grimoire, Tangle Tower tells a family drama murder mystery with fun twists and turns. I really like the process of figuring out the puzzles, and the narrative is well-paced across the 5 hours. The most clever moments of this game are when it decides to step back and let you look through your clues and present the right evidence to the right character. I hope for the eventual continuation of this franchise that the developer pulls even farther back and allows the player to make even broader deducations. Truly excellent!

I'm unsure of how to start talking about this game, as there's so many good things to bring up and discuss that I'm going to end up sounding disorganized regardless of how I go about it. Still I'll try my best, by starting off on doing something I hate in reviews: comparing it to something else.

SFB Games has had previous games, most notably being Haunt The House and Snipperclips. While I doubt as many people remember Haunt the House as fondly as I do, Snipperclips was kind of a runaway success. I mean it didn't do gangbusters but I remember it was everywhere when the Switch launched, and it was going toe to toe with Breath of the Wild for attention. But why bring this up? Well, I just made you inadvertently think about how cute and pretty those games were. This game is also very pretty, with exceedingly detailed backgrounds and amazing character designs and animations. I love Flora's and Hawkshaw's in specific.

To match the detail of the environment, this game rewards you for picking through each area for tiny clues and interactions between the two protagonists. Their banter is really nice and, while not making me laugh, still really endeared me to their characters and makes me want to see more of them. This also extends to the residents of Tangle Tower, who are all pretty fun in their own ways. Each character even has a unique piece of dialogue depending on which piece of evidence you show them, and I mean for every piece of evidence. It's even more impressive since the game is fully voice acted.

Not once was there a subpar performance, all of these characters had perfect voices and amazing line delivery, personal favorite being Fitz, which felt more and more fitting the more I played. In the same realm, the overall sound of the game is great. The ambience sets the mood for every location, some areas making me feel pretty genuinely stressed with how unnerving they could feel. That combined with the wonderful visuals left me in the experience for the whole playthrough, even when I stepped away from my computer to take breaks.

If there's one part of the game I felt faltered a bit, it's the puzzle part. Some of them can be pretty obtuse or kinda dumb with how simple they are, but that felt so few and far between, it hardly feels like something worth REALLY criticizing. It isn't the hardest puzzle game ever, but it isn't exactly super easy either, y'know?

I've left spoilers light on this because I really really do think you should play this, if you've read this far for some reason (and, if that's the case, hi, and thank you!) It's not that spoilers would ruin anything, I just think it's better to see what it all has to offer for yourself rather than having me try to convince you via a wall of text. So yeah, play Tangle Tower, it's really great (:

The reasoning behind why I played this game is simple: I have a penchant for unorthodox murder mysteries, and I adored the art style at first sight. I really enjoyed the game in the end, despite a few caveats.

I'd like to get this out of the way first: I don't like how this game controls on consoles. It's obvious from the get-go that this game was made primarily for devices equipped with either a touchscreen or computer mouse. On consoles, you move a virtual cursor around with your analog stick. For standard point-and-click exploration, this is a perfectly fine solution. What baffles me is that these same controls are used in the game's menus. It makes anytime you have to use the menus (decently frequently) somewhat cumbersome. You have to move the cursor between all the options and select them that way. You can't even push B to close the menu or something, you gotta move the cursor to the top-left corner every single time. All they had to do was make it so you highlight and move between individual options at the push of a button, like any other menu interface in a video game. Regardless, I played the game in handheld mode with the touch screen in order to preserve my sanity.

Personal control debacles aside, there is A LOT to love about Tangle Tower. The game is voice-acted in full, and all the actors do a phenomenal job. This game immediately scratched my itch of inspecting literally every single object on a screen, and rewarded that habit in full, either with humorous dialogue, or an interesting discovery. Every single screen is beautifully designed. Each of the characters you meet are unique and memorable in terms of design, personality quirks, accents and verbal tics, the works. The fully-orchestrated music is whimsical and mysterious. The presentation is extremely strong.

The proper puzzles are very strong, often requiring a bit of unorthodox thinking to solve. The segments where you mix sentences to reach a conclusion never felt satisfying to me though. Not only do they mostly feel like trial and error, but you also can't access your evidence during them, which feels like a missed opportunity in terms of letting the player review their facts to reach a conclusion. It also doesn't help that once you reach a certain point, it feels like the game just barrels towards its ending with very little regard to pacing, taking away some satisfaction from solving the mystery.

Overall, I can definitely recommend this one to fans of puzzle games and murder mysteries, particularly stuff like Phoenix Wright or Professor Layton. It probably won't impress or tax your brain like those two series do, but it's a standalone experience worthy of at least one full playthrough, despite a few flaws.

A nice short detective game, reminiscent of games like Layton or Ace Attorney.
The art style and voice acting are pretty good and I really liked the enviroment of the isolated mansion surrounded by mystery and the quirky distinctive character personalities and designs.

The puzzles are mostly self contained and I found some of them pretty clever in their execution, having you use trial and error or real world knowledge.

The overarching story wasn't so great, there were some nice twists to it (and I personally enjoyed the mechanic about revealing each character's secret), but the final revelation didn't feel like that much of a deal. Besides the murder's motives felt weak and convoluted.

While I enjoyed the 'mostly' non-linear exploration of the mansion, solving its mysteries at your own pace, the game does a lot of hand-holding.
For example, at times it promts you to go to a certain character when you have found every piece of evidence that pertains to them. There are also things that you could have figured out by yourself but the gameplay almost directly tells you.
I know these are common problems in detective games (and the game sometimes trys to fix them) but I wish they could have been executed in a different way.

Overall if you like the genre I think you will enjoy it, and the puzzles, characters and enviroment are pretty good, but expect a short and slightly weak story.

All I want is more games like this. I love games about solving mysteries and though the mechanics here aren't difficult, they serve their purpose in highlighting the real star of the show: the beautifully drawn and entertainingly acted cast of weird characters. The writing is the real star of the show here and it was relentlessly charming.

I was satisfied with the story and how the mystery wrapped up. As with most good mysteries, the solving of it was wrapped up in better understanding the characters and the setting.

This was just an unabashedly fun point and click mystery, and I immediately turned around to check out other games in the series. I can only hope this series gets more attention, I want to see more of these!!