Tower of Nod

In a sea of indie roguelikes, this was the only one during next fest that actually caught my attention. It's fun, really unique, has a very high skill ceiling, etc. I haven't even beaten the first floor yet but given the cheap price and the sheer fun of the game I can definitely recommend it. Basically a cruel game of tetris where you need to create platforms for yourself to climb to the top of a room. You can earn more tetronimos to add to your deck, and they might have wacky effects. The platforming is simple at first, but there are ways you can stack up blocks to account for walljumping or headbonking, and you can even make use of the falling block itself in a pinch. There' I do have a few complaints. The lasers fire far, far more quickly than they should. It's basically impossible to react to them when they appear, and the intervals between them seem pretty random. Either make the tell last a lot longer before the laser fires, or have the lasers fire at a concrete interval. Also, I don't think the falling lava should be affected by physics, because sometimes it can move around in unexpected ways leading to cheap hits. And finally, it would be nice if the default jump was just…

Have you ever seen a tetris roguelike platformer before? I know I didn't. The mechanics are well implemented, and the game is more than challenging enough to force you to experiment with them and find solutions. It's what they call emergent gameplay. The infinite replayability probably isn't quite there, but there's plenty of stuff to discover to keep it interesting until the point of beating the game. With some pretty nice art and level designs, and again, just a solid, clean execution of the gameplay elements, it makes for a well made experience.

This game is a unique mix of some very familiar and time tested mechanics: Tetris, platforming, and rouge-likes. It's a very lean game with little to no bloat, and it has a surprising amount of character/charm given the simple visual style. The game play is very dynamic and for lack of a better term, has a sort of emergent feel to it. By emergent I mean that mechanics often have a dual purpose and react as real entities rather than key to lock solutions. An example of this is the Tetris pieces themselves, while you can simply bring them down and stack them as expected, you can also platform on them while they are in free-fall. This opens up a surprising amount of platforming possibilities and I found ways to quickly reach the exit door by combining the wall jump with the temporary elevated position of Tetris pieces. If you are interested enough to bother reading the reviews, I highly recommend that you at least try the demo for this game.