Mr. Booker, where are we? / It’s a circus, Elizabeth.
That’s the very feeling you get when you first look at Twisted Tower. The game unabashedly takes BioShock as its main inspiration and reference, and it does so quite well. Its own style captivates with the dark grotesqueness and resemblance to the city of Rapture. From the very first minutes, you feel as if you’ve entered another section of the underwater city, only this time it’s a section located outdoors—on a mysterious island off the coast of Wales, cloaked in eternal night, thick fog, and containing an abandoned amusement park.
But let’s start from the beginning.
Before we talk about the game itself, we need to talk about the man who created it. For five years, Thomas Brush—the indie developer behind Pinstripe and Never Song—lived in this world. He worked 12-15 hours a day and would leave the studio at two in the morning, staring at the ceiling and thinking, “I’m not going to finish this game. What am I even doing?”
Two years ago, he recorded a video that went viral. His hair was tousled, his gaze lost, his hands shaking. He apologized for his appearance. He said he’d lost weight, that he hadn’t slept in almost a month, that impostor syndrome was tearing him apart. And then, in one of the more recent videos that you can find below, he said something that made me pause the video and just sit in silence:
“I want my game to smell. I want to smell burnt popcorn. I want to smell a musty, damp carpet that’s stained with Coca-Cola. I want to smell cigarette smoke and boiled hot dogs that had been sitting in that boiled hot dog water for a year. That’s what I want to smell, that’s what I want to feel. I want to live in this world, and I want to be there. That’s my heart, my soul as an artist, I want to live in these worlds that I create.”
You can take this however you want. Call it posturing, an attempt to sell a game development course (yes, Brush has one—and he really does help people become developers). But when someone talks about their project as a place where they want to live, not just make money, you can hear it. You can feel it.
Twisted Tower wasn’t born as a commercially vetted product. It wasn’t meticulously planned with a calculator in hand, it wasn’t adapted to current trends, it didn’t ask the focus group: “Guys, what would you like to see in a boomer shooter about clowns?” It was made because Thomas Brush wanted to play it. And that is the most honest thing an indie developer can say.
Twisted Tower is an indie boomer shooter that simplified BioShock’s gameplay to “run around, solve puzzles, and have fun in arenas.” And that’s not an insult, just a statement of fact.
The game consists of five fully-fledged linear levels that create the illusion of nonlinearity. In reality, they fly by in a straight line—you’re simply shown a beautiful corridor and told, “Go there.” But this corridor is so stylishly designed that it’s a pleasure to walk along.
Each location is a separate world within the park:
- The lobby is the central hub where we start and return.
- The hotel consists of tangled corridors haunted by the ghosts of the past.
- The water park is just what you’d expect: water, rust, the atmosphere of abandoned revelry, and the smell.
- The clown casino, bright, crazy, and dangerous. You can also pull levers and win prizes… or nothing at all.
- The Carnival in the Woods is gloomy, with wooden wagons and a Ferris Wheel… oddly suggestive.
- The Space Station is a futuristic finale with floating brains in Gatling gun jars. Yeah, right.
Each location teaches the players and the protagonist something new. In one, you get clown boots, allowing you to jump higher on trampolines. In another, wings, allowing you to glide and dash through the air. In a third, a harpoon that pulls you to special points on the walls or ceiling. And finally, a jetpack for a double jump.
The locations are structured similarly: several battle arenas interspersed with an overarching puzzle. You either search for keys, activate levers, or collect tickets. The puzzles, frankly, are incredibly simple. It’s hard to get lost in them. They don’t evoke the same sense of accomplishment that comes from solving a puzzle correctly. They’re simply there. And that’s more of a neutral aspect than a negative.
There are quite a few weapons in the game, and they add a lot of variety to the gameplay. Here are the things that you have at your disposal:
- The hammer is your primary melee weapon. It hits enemies with a satisfying punch, and sounds like meat. Or metal. It depends on who or what you’re hitting.
- The pistol and revolver are the basic weapons for long-range firefights.
- The double-barreled shotgun is for close encounters.
- The tommy gun is a legendary weapon I’ve loved since the first Mafia. In Twisted Tower, it can fire all its ammo at once, turning into a mini-Gatling gun.
- The Martian cannon fires homing projectiles that explode on command. The only problem: we get it half an hour before the finale. We never get to realize its full potential.
- Other weapon variations are also present in the game, such as a rapid-fire dart launcher, a whooping shotgun, a bubblegum shooter, and a sniper slingshot. All of these are useful during the game.
Each weapon has its pros and cons and is suited to specific tasks. Overall, you’ll use the entire arsenal throughout the game (with a couple of notable exceptions). For example, players can get their hands on the alien blaster towards the end of the game, and it’s not really used because the game ends after 15 minutes. The only time I used it was when the entire arsenal was forcibly taken away.
All weapons can be upgraded, increasing their damage, reload speed, and ammo capacity, and also adding alternate fire to each weapon. The tommy gun, for example, gains a slow-motion effect that expels all remaining ammunition, and the pistol grants currency for headshots. Weapons are upgraded at the local kiosk, which requires special currency, tickets, and there are so many of them that by the end of the game, you can upgrade two-thirds of your arsenal without breaking a sweat.
There’s another drawback besides the “unnecessary” guns, a purely personal one that slightly spoiled the gameplay experience for me. It’s the classic weapon bindings to the 1-0 keys. We live in a world where Half-Life exists, which solved this problem long ago by binding weapons of one archetype to a single key. So, to equip a double-barreled shotgun, I don’t have to stretch my finger across the entire keyboard and press the shotgun selector button again. Yes, the game has a weapon selection wheel, but for me it breaks the pace of the game, and it’s mostly intended for console controls.
The enemies in Twisted Tower are a separate art form. They’re both funny and dangerous.
You’ll be attacked by such creatures as knife-wielding huggable bears (they also come in larger versions that shred your health in a couple of hits), ducks with shotguns, giraffes with pistols, telephone machines and many, many more highly creative adversaries. There are even flying brains with guns, the pinnacle of the game’s absurdity. You have to first break their protective shell, and then destroy their brains. It looks comical and terrifying at the same time.
Enemies have basic intelligence. Riflemen try to stay at a distance, flamethrowers try to teleport behind you, and witches cover everyone with a shield. They can even jump. I once tried to hide on a visor to reload – and got an unexpected surprise when the entire room decided to jump on me. It was both infuriating and cool.
However, the game does have an important problem, and it is pacing, which leads to “leisurely” becoming “stuffy”.
Arenas are announced through a cutscene: a door slams followed by ominous laughter, enemies spawn. The battle ends with another pause, a phrase, and then a focus on the opening door. After the fifth time, this starts to get tiresome. The game itself is slowing down the pace.
Cutscenes showing you where to go are also a questionable mechanic. They’re a nod to old-school game development, but in 2026, they feel archaic. You want to run, but they slow you down to show you another door. Instead of letting you explore and understand what’s changed, they just hand it to you on a silver platter.
And another thing: there are woefully few traps in the game. Saws, spikes, pits—all of these were in trailers from a year or two ago, but they seemingly didn’t make it into the final version. Why were they cut? It’s unclear. But these very mechanisms would have created that very feeling of overcoming adversity that the game lacks.
Enemies appear in small waves. You kill two or three enemies, wait, reload, heal, run around the arena… and only then do the next ones appear. On normal difficulty, there’s time to spare. This doesn’t add any dynamism.
But there are good moments, too. A couple of the game’s arenas are well-designed: they’re intense, with powerful music and large waves of enemies. You’re really tense, you’re looking for cover, you’re firing on all cylinders. There are only two or three such moments, but they’re memorable.
You know what I loved most about Twisted Tower? The sound design.
When you hit a surface with a hammer, you hear the sound of hitting that surface. When you smash a pumpkin, you hear the sound of it breaking. When you hit an enemy, you hear the impact with flesh. When you shoot at metal, you hear the clang of metal.
Oh yeah… Remember those silly barriers in every game that keep you from moving? Yeah, the taut cable between two pillars? The ones you can’t remove, bypass, or destroy in any game? Here you CAN knock them down… Oh my God. I spent the first 5 minutes of the game KNOCKING DOWN THOSE POSTS! THANK YOU!
These details seem small, but they create the feeling that the world is alive. You’re not in a vacuum. You’re in an amusement park that breathes, creaks, drips, and explodes.
The music is also top-notch. Each location has its own accompaniment, its own style. It’s energetic in combat, melancholic in exploration, and oppressive in horror moments. And the final boss battle is simply mind-blowing.
And yes, jumpscares. I’m someone who’s played a lot of horror games. It’s hard to scare me. But Twisted Tower made me jump a couple of times. The jump scares are perfectly timed and sounded—they appear exactly when you least expect them, and in just the right way to really get on your nerves.
Visually, the game is a mix of BioShock, We Happy Few, and Disneyland, seasoned with a horror atmosphere. The locations are detailed, each room filled with little details: cobwebs, spider eggs, mannequins, inflated balloons you can blow up, crates, bottles. Posters of Vincent’s father’s films are everywhere. References to the plot are everywhere. You can just walk around and look around, and it’s a real treat.
But the visuals have a downside. Many rooms are simply empty. You walk from arena to arena through two or three corridors, each containing nothing but beautiful textures. I’d like to see more depth.
There are secret spots in every location. Sometimes they’re difficult to find, sometimes they’re incredibly easy. In one location, they’re almost right at the entrance, you just need to walk along the parapets to the left and right. In another, you crawl through a vent, harpooning, pulling yourself up to hidden spots. In a third, you jump on a large box, and… that’s it. That’s the secret. There are just a couple of bullets and tickets there.
This is a bit puzzling. If I see a box, I jump on it. It’s not a secret, it’s just part of the level. A real secret should be hidden, difficult to find, and the reward should be worth the effort. Here, the reward is often disproportionate to the effort.
There’s an achievement in the game for finding all the secrets in one playthrough. I never got it after two runs. Not because I didn’t find them, but because some of the secrets just don’t make sense. Is it worth it? I don’t know.
The plot of Twisted Tower is a layered cake of clichés, references, and unexpected twists that works far better than it first appears.
Our hero Vincent is an ordinary guy who proposes to his girlfriend in the car while watching an old movie. She accepts… and then they are promptly kidnapped. Vincent wakes up on a mysterious island, home to an abandoned amusement park—Twisted Tower. His goal is to climb to the top of the tower and rescue his beloved.
But the story turns out to be much more complicated than its premise.
Vincent suffers from memory problems. His mother calls him a “goldfish”—he only remembers things that truly interest him. For example, he memorizes all the dialogue from the movies he watched with his girlfriend. But he doesn’t know the medical terms needed for the surgical exam. He fails it and lies to his girlfriend that he passed. And then proposes because he’s panicked she’ll leave if she finds out the truth.
His sister is schizophrenic and had to be institutionalized. And his father, whom Vincent barely remembers, turns out to be a director, the creator of the very movie they watched in the car, and, as it turns out, the creator of the Twisted Tower amusement park. His father is sick with cancer. He wants to make his last film and pass the park on to someone worthy. The main character of this film turns out to be… Vincent. And his girlfriend is the leading actress.
The ending is a different story. You fight the “monster” at the top of the tower, win, approach your beloved, kiss her, and suddenly notice: she has two arms. Although halfway through the game, you saw one of her arms get chopped off. And there are cameras all around. And Vincent’s father’s voice says, “Cut.” Twisted Tower is a film within a film, a performance in which our hero had been a pawn from the very beginning.
But here’s the thing. There are letters scattered throughout the game. From them, we learn that Vincent’s mother told him, “You should have gone into the theater, like your father. You have acting talent.” Tell me, what’s more likely: that his father really did kidnap Vincent and his girlfriend to make a film, or that Vincent, under the pressure of his parents and a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia, simply… snapped?
I don’t know the answer. And that’s wonderful.
The ending leaves room for interpretation. And in an age when games fear ambiguity, that’s worth a lot. The credits read, “Closed doors are now open.” Previously, throughout the game, you’d encounter locked passages with signs reading “under construction.” A hint that the full version will offer more than just one ending.
I’ve already played through the game twice. And I’ll be back when it’s released because I’m curious to see what really happened.
Thomas Brush recorded several videos about the making of Twisted Tower. And there’s one line in them that stuck in my head:
“What a privilege it is to be exhausted by a creative project. Most people in this world never do anything like this. How cool it is to be exhausted by an idea.”
He said it with the genuine smile of a man who knows he has earned the right to be tired. Five years of development. Five years of doubt. Five years of waking up at two in the morning and staring at the ceiling, thinking, “What am I doing? Why am I wasting my life on this?”
But he didn’t give up. And now Twisted Tower is out. It’s imperfect. It’s short. It’s a bit empty in places. It has a faulty currency balance, boring cutscenes, and overly simple puzzles. But it has soul. It has love. It has a world you want to live in. And that is what matters most. After endless 100-hour AAA open-world masterpieces, it’s like a breath of fresh air (even if it smells like burnt popcorn).
Sometimes you just want to turn off your brain and just shoot the living daylights out of something for a few hours. And if an interesting story unfolds along the way, that’s fantastic. And while Twisted Tower doesn’t excel, it still holds up admirably.
You’re probably asking, “Why should I play a short and poorly balanced game?” And I’ll answer: because it has heart.
In an age where AAA studios churn out products on a conveyor belt, Twisted Tower is a reminder that games are made by people. Not “product managers” or “business strategists.” People who want to live in their own worlds. People who fall asleep at two in the morning wondering how to create the perfect sound of a hammer hitting meat. People who are tired as hell, but still keep going.
I’ll return to Twisted Tower after the final version comes out. I’m curious about what’s hidden behind closed doors. I’m curious about the “one true” ending. I’m simply curious to immerse myself in this world again—one that smells of burnt popcorn, musty carpet, and old hot dogs. If you’re tired of perfect, cookie-cutter games, give Twisted Tower a chance. It might not become your favorite, but it will definitely be memorable.
P.S. Thomas Brush, if you’re reading this, you’re doing great. You did what you set out to do, and that’s a victory. Everything else is just numbers on a Steam screen.
- Similar to: BioShock
- Note: the Steam key was provided for free for the purposes of this review.
