In the Continent of Imperia, it is the 511th year of the Unified Era. The Kingdoms of Athos and Elyria, once at war, are now holding out tensions in hopes of preventing another all-out war. Despite this, the kingdom of Elyria celebrates a Harvest Festival to celebrate the current rule. Tragedy strikes in the middle of the celebration however, as the young maiden of the festival was struck by an ancient curse in the middle of her performance. This curse will slowly turn her into a horrific beast… unless she consumes flesh. The maiden Elena, and her lover Aeron press onward into the Thirteen Towers of Okanos, looking to find something that will free her from her curse. Will their love be true? Can this pair of lovers cope with the tragedy that awaits them?
One of the biggest problems of the game industry these days is the overabundance of mass market, high budget games. The reason this is a problem is because all of these games aim high, but also expect high returns, which in turns leads to practices that mitigate any kind of risk and boldness from the creative team that develops them. Pandering should be the least of player’s concerns when one of the tactics that AAA gaming employs revolves entirely around forcing further, yet smaller transactions out of the player for progressively smaller pieces of content.
Uncreative, derivative and even rushed or incomplete games are sadly prevalent in the market of singleplayer experiences, while smaller games continue to fall under the cracks as the practice of developing videogames becomes more and more expensive to meet the standards of the generation. It’s a vicious self-fulfilling cycle of disappointment and ubiquity which most gamers are desperate to break out of. However, it is an issue that could be mitigated by introducing a larger variety of experimental middle market titles with low risk and low expected returns aimed at a more niche audience.
After all, some of the surprise hits of today had humble beginnings as middle market games aimed at a niche audience, and when they are able to succeed they do so in spades. It is true then, that only the most successful of these middle market games are able to survive the dogfight of dominance and prevalence over the gaming market and achieve some form of mainstream recognition, while the rest are doomed to remain buried under the cracks of obscurity as more widely appealing games are placed in the forefront.
Pandora’s Tower is one such game. It is a humble middle market game developed with the intention to experiment with new ideas, especially for a studio that had previously been misused to work only on cheap licensed games. It’s a rather specific type of game that I can only describe with the term “Poverty Action”, which is the embodiment of middle market action and maybe roleplaying games that lack polish due to their low production values, but make up for it with plenty of experimentation and genre mixing.
In this case, the blender mix of genres that Pandora’s Tower attempts to make due with are Action-Adventure, RPG Dungeon Crawling and Dating/Life Simulation. Definitely a large and ambitious list of genres that, though they may have been attempted before by more successful teams of developers, still offer enough variety to make it at least interesting on a conceptual basis. But alas, that is the problem with Pandora’s Tower both in concept and execution. It’s a jack of all trades, but master of none.
It’s a competent game of course, and throughout its hours of gameplay it offers sprinkles of brilliant ideas, soft emotional reactions and gameplay that is good enough to barely last that long. However, I can’t help but feel like there are piles of wasted potential with these concepts and clever ideas that the developers clearly wanted to proudly display, but didn’t quite know how to weave properly into something that was elegant or at the very least compelling. It’s a game that is never truly excellent or really satisfying in anything it tries to do, and for that it’s quite disappointing.
No more indicative of this is the game’s combat, which is noteworthy only in how little of it really stands out against the rest of the experience. It’s simple and shallow to the point where it’s almost a detriment to the experience, but due to the incorporation of some unique ideas it at least retains a kind of novelty value to those who play it. Its overall execution however leaves a lot to be desired, and is another potential reason why the game doesn’t reach its potential.
On the most basic level, the combat of the game consists of a single combo string with a heavy attack that can be performed by holding the attack button and releasing it to perform a string of stronger attacks whose length depends on your weapon’s level. Due to a lack of any other means by which to directly engage in a combat situation with enemies besides basic dodging and blocking, the combat in the game boils down to a very simplistic and barebones grind that is made only slightly more underwhelming due to somewhat weightless attack animations, minimal feedback from attack collision and an inability to lock onto enemies to properly connect attacks.
If this was all there is to combat, then the game would wear out its welcome very quickly, however the implementation of a chain weapon controlled by the Wii Remote pointer makes combat encounters more interesting and keeps the player invested in learning the new mechanics that come out of its usage. Besides that, the chain makes it so that the gameplay of Pandora’s Tower is wholly unique to the Nintendo Wii system, utilizing its key features to differentiate and solidify it as a title that functions only for the target console, which in turn gives it more novelty value.
What makes the chain interesting though is the variety of abilities that you are able to use with it, allowing you to greatly diversify your strategy for each combat encounter, especially in regards to the way you interact with enemies. You can chain enemies and charge a meter in order to deal a devastating blow, at the cost of a long wind up move. When surrounded by a group of enemies, you can do crowd control by chain enemies together, allowing you to share damage between the two foes. You can attack at range using the chain and you can throw an enemy to another in order to deal with distant foes as well. All of these strategies are varied ways with which to engage with the combat, helping diversify the dullness a little bit by providing more out of the box solutions to otherwise mundane encounters.
Each of the enemy’s body parts can also be chained up individually, with different effects depending on which part of their body is being afflicted. This is another fun way to devise strategies and perform increasingly complex maneuvers in order to deal with a crowd of enemies. Only real problem to it is that the aim detection for body parts with the Wii remote is a little too finicky, leading to tedious moments of pointing at the body part you want to chain up, while the game or the camera struggle to detect what you want to be pointing at.
What makes these base mechanics more interesting though is engaging with them against a variety of enemies with different methods of attack, strengths and body shapes. It makes each enemy feel unique because the player engages with them not just in the way that they can dispatch them, but also in the ways that they can be used as an environmental advantage when fighting other enemies. Although there are a sufficient amount of enemy types to make the game interesting, they don’t really evolve or progress as the game goes further on. By the end of the game, the player will fight enemies that probably feel the same as the enemies they fought at the start, with little to no differentiation.
And at the end of the day, that is the biggest caveat to the combat mechanics of Pandora’s Tower. The combat at the start of the game is exactly the same as the combat at the end of the game, with no new tricks, strategies or mechanics being introduced as the game goes on. The novelty of using the chain wears really fast, and due to a significantly low skill ceiling the game has very little to come back to because there is very little to learn. It is a monotone experience throughout, with no ups and downs for the player to learn, master and adapt to.
Exploration is no different than combat in Pandora’s Tower. It’s executed in a novel, but ultimately lacking way that wears out its welcome not soon after it starts. Combining elements from Legend of Zelda and typical JRPG dungeon crawlers, the game’s dungeons have you exploring a series of rooms connected by hallways and a circular hub area, solving puzzles and fighting enemies until you get to the boss of the whole dungeon.
Unlike Zelda, the game doesn’t expect the player to finish the dungeon in one sitting, instead designing these to accommodate for the inherent time limit that Elena’s transformations bring into the game. As a result, the player is always worried about their remaining time, while still having plenty of forgiving ways to backtrack to the entrance as well as shortcuts to get to later parts without wasting much time either. It’s a great way of designing dungeons that takes into consideration the mechanics of the game as well as the constraints of the player.
The game’s fixed camera angles also help set up the strong and ominous atmosphere of these dungeons while also showing its design from a vantage point that really lets the player take in their art design. It is a shame, however, that these fixed camera angles often get in the way of combat and create a little too much of a confusing idea of how each of the rooms in these dungeons connect to each other and form a cohesive whole, making the game more claustrophobic than it probably should have been.
Sadly, even with the comprehensive way that they are designed, the dungeons in Pandora’s Tower fail to impress because of a more important reason, which is structure and pacing. Dungeons in the game are very linear and very short, holding very little of the player’s attention while they breeze through the small selections of puzzles and enemy encounters which in turn leads to a very underwhelming feeling of non-accomplishment once they’re over. A greater length or greater challenge would have helped to make them more interesting to explore, but without any of these, dungeons feel all the same no matter what elemental theme or puzzle gimmick they have on the surface.
The only worthwhile reward to finishing each of the game’s twelve dungeons is getting to face off against the boss that lies at the top. Each of these bosses has its unique design and backstory that gives them enough personality to contextualize the strategy that makes them very interesting and exhilarating to fight. Each of these bosses tests the player’s skills with the chain in interesting ways, making it the peak of the game from a gameplay standpoint.
Combat and exploration are only half of the game however, as the other half of it is spent engaging with the game’s life simulation and role playing mechanics. Either of these feel more like a diversion than an actual driving force for gameplay though, giving extra context to the more monotonous grind that is exploring the game’s thirteen towers.
And for the sake of managing smaller, but significant tasks on the background while the main course of gameplay is going on, it’s decent enough. The game gives the player sufficient busywork through its crafting and shop, which gives the player something to think about and something to be on the lookout for while otherwise progressing through the game as normal. These two are important, not just because they allow the player to upgrade themselves but also because they can craft or buy gifts for Elena, which raises her affinity for the player and in turn rewards you with a better ending.
Interacting with Elena has its own charm too. Her character is lively and believable enough for you to at least care a little about the systems set in place to engage with her. Elena moves around the house, has different things to say and even has some unique events for you to discover. The game really puts you into the mindset of your main character, Aeron, overexerting himself to help Elena. When you go out and collect materials to craft or buy gifts, or when you come to the Observatory on a rush to feed her flesh, you really feel like you are doing your best to cure her curse and keep her happy throughout all.
The game rewards this kind of playstyle too. Each of the gifts you give to Elena can change the look of the observatory as well. The better you are at keeping her happy, the more you will be rewarded with pleasant decoration, lighting and atmosphere. You can also give clothes to Elena that she can wear while you visit her. At the same time, the game discourages transformations by not only stripping away the changes in aesthetics, but also by treating you to disturbing and twisted scenes of her suffering and anguish.
The twisted and disgusting transformations of Elena use horror effectively to create a strong aversion towards failure, and the agony the character shows is more reason for the player to avoid ever getting to this stage. Even still, avoiding a transformation or a game over is so easy that the player is likely to not ever have to see any of these transformations, which puts to waste all these clever mental manipulations and sick psychological horrors for the average playthrough.
In all honesty, the dating sim mechanics with Elena don’t quite work so well because it’s so easily exploitable. After hours of engaging with the system, its simplicity becomes so apparent that the process of satisfying Elena boils down to spamming the same gifts and repeatedly listening to her same lines of dialogue over and over. What was once a slight challenge now becomes monotony, and that monotony is then rewarded with some of the better endings. This in turn makes the triumph of forming this supposed everlasting bond with her all the more underwhelming.
It is strange then, that a game that feels like it wants to marry its mechanics to the story actually ends up hurting the story because of the way the mechanics treat the subject matter of the story. When you systematically break down what is supposed to be a loving relationship between two people, all the emotion behind it is gone, instead feeling completely detached from any of the emotion that should have gone into it. The player doesn’t feel like they love Elena, they just feel like she is another mechanic, another component of the gameplay that they must adapt to in order to get the best outcome. It is the opposite of what the message of the game is trying to portray.
The very methodical and structured way in which the way progresses ends up evolving into a mindlessly repeating series of simplistic and mundane tasks that comprise the structure of Pandora’s Tower. It is a very repetitive game that heavily outstays its welcome by the end, feeling like its hours longer than it should. The lack of any original soundtrack and repetition of few orchestrations only helps lessen the variety of every situation while also creating a very lacking soundscape for the game which does not ease upon the otherwise monotonous experience.
A severe lack of variety and repetition is prevalent even within the layouts and designs of its twelve main dungeons, which are repeated at least once for every six dungeons, meaning that only six of these are completely new. As a result, Pandora’s Tower not only feels a bit creatively stale, but also repetitive and somewhat boring. When the player has little new to discover, instead finding pieces of reused content as they move along, they don’t feel rewarded for their efforts and instead want to finish everything as quickly as possible because they don’t see these challenges as content, but padding instead.
Pandora’s Tower is a game that is full of padding. Although it is thirty hours long, it only has enough content to substantiate at least ten of those hours. This padding and reuse of content only really helps to hurt the story and experience of playing the game. The delivery of the story feels lost beneath the constant repetition of gameplay cycles, only presenting itself with small hints laid out through notes or unique cutscenes that flesh out its characters, which aren’t nearly prevalent enough to break out of that slow pace.
To the game’s credit however, the cutscenes that are shown are effective in their own right. They focus exactly on developing the one thing that is central to the premise of the game, which is Elena and her curse. It is all rather effective, not only because Elena is a character that is well established and has individual goals, aspirations, routines and feelings, but also because she is further fleshed out by the way she responds to the tragedy that has befallen her. Elena discovers things about herself through this ordeal, while also suffering the anxiety of bearing such a burden.
While all that’s going on, Pandora’s Tower also spends a great deal of its background information developing the lore and mythos of its own world. These can be genuinely interesting as well, since they tell stories of their own with themes and characters that are as delightfully twisted as those of the main story. Figuring the mythos out is a little bit of a wasted effort however, because even though the game spends so much time presenting these to you early on, they are outright explained to the player by the end, devaluing the effort of finding them out and deciphering them on your own.
Trying to make sense of all these notes is actually worse for the experience of the game, because once you know what they mean and put the pieces together, you will learn information way ahead of when the game pulls the curtain from you and reveals what was really going on. If you pay too much attention, the game’s proper twists and turns are just outright spoiled, lessening their impact once it’s time to properly reveal them.
In general, Pandora’s Tower has difficulty pacing its moments of tragedy and levity, not allowing either of the two to linger for long enough for the experience to be as emotional as it should. Whenever we get to have a good time with Elena, we only really do it for a short cutscene before the grind of the gameplay shows up again. When we worry about Elena or ponder about the disturbing nature of the circumstances though, our worries are easily quelled, eased in, resolved or just outright forgotten. That’s not to say that these moments are very fleeting or that the player has no emotional connection to the events that are happening, but they don’t resonate with the same kind of importance that the game treats them with.
At the same time, the game has a constant dissonance between its premise and tone. The game has a very twisted premise, but the game presents an otherwise very romantic tone that feels misguided in a way. Pandora’s Tower juxtaposes dark and twisted concepts and developments but follows them up with mellow themes and very normal storytelling conventions. While this isn’t an issue by itself, it does lead to an experience filled with wasted potential that just isn’t captured by the game’s execution.
And the reason it feels like wasted potential is because the narrative of the game depends so heavily on making you relate and connect to a relationship between two characters that is just very poorly developed, even along the course of a lengthy game. Rather than establishing reasons for the player to be invested in this couple, the developers leave their relationship to be broken down by coldhearted gameplay mechanics that cannot replace a human connection in any way. If the extent of Aeron’s connection to Elena is the same as my investment in those mechanics, then the everlasting bond that the game portrays just isn’t accurate.
As a result of this, the best endings of the game don’t feel earned as they should, because our connection to Elena is so systematically built up by numbers and patterns, and not by any actual affection for the character that extends beyond a very surface level liking of her basic traits. It shouldn’t be the player’s responsibility to be Elena’s partner, but Aeron‘s development is so lacking that the player has to fill in the blanks for him, even though they should’ve relied on him to connect to the narrative much close.
With all of this being said, the image I get from Pandora’s Tower is of a story and a game with plenty of unique ideas that are left to die under very conventional and established execution as well as what could be a lack of push or talent to give any of these concepts the execution that they deserved in order to truly shine. Because for what it is, Pandora’s Tower is fine, but only just fine. And in this case, being fine is the biggest problem, because it could have been something great, maybe even excellent.
However, at the same time, the fact that this game even exists is an admission that the team at Ganbarion was once able to break out of its shell of producing countless licensed games in order to create something that is dark, twisted and filled with plenty of rebellious spirit. It is the kind of game that was made out of creative synergy and originality, which is far more valuable than any cynically made product on the market.
That is why, despite its flaws, Pandora’s Tower and many other middle market games deserve to have a place in the market. It is because of all the ideas that it contains and the boldness to at least try to make them happen. Though it wasn’t successful, it is still a game that can inspire others to do better and to try something new, so that the next bold developer can get another shot at success.