The team behind the Tiny Game Chronicles podcast takes a look at a game they covered in a previous month’s episode in this monthly series of articles. For September, Michael delves into Tangle Tower by following their usual podcast format. Subscribe to The Tiny Game Chronicles podcast for their fortnightly episodes on short-form video games, and please make sure to check out the accompanying episode to this article.
Tangle Tower is not the kind of detective game that leaves you alone with a wall of clues. It is more generous than that. It gives you a strange house, a dead artist, a painting holding a knife, and a group of people who all look as though they have been waiting years for someone to ask the wrong questions.
You play as Detective Grimoire and his patient, sharp-eyed partner, Sally, as they investigate the murder of Freya Fellow in a mansion full of secrets and family history. The premise is over the top in exactly the right way. A portrait seems to be the main suspect. The family living around it are all carrying their own small storms. And the tower itself feels less like a normal house than a place assembled from private grief, old grudges, strange hobbies, and rooms that have each been allowed to develop their own personality.
SFB Games has made a compact detective adventure that knows what it is. It is not aiming for the cold logic of a courtroom game or the weight of a grim crime drama. This is a Goth-inspired comic mystery, closer to The Addams Family and A Series of Unfortunate Events than anything realistic. There is a little of Edward Scissorhands in its vibe, just not in black and white but by being bold and colourful.
High-Level Thoughts
I played Tangle Tower in just under eight hours on PC, after discovering that the lack of touchscreen functionality on Steam Deck made it less comfortable than I wanted. Even there, though, the game’s sense of pace held together. It is built around a simple loop: you enter rooms, inspect objects, speak to suspects, collect clues, solve a contained puzzle, and then use what you have learned to move further into the case.
There is very little wasted time here. The map is a great help, keeping the mansion readable without making it feel small. You are rarely forced to wander around hoping you have clicked the one strange object the game was waiting for. Each room is focused. Each conversation has a reason to exist. Each puzzle feels like it belongs where you find it.
That clarity is one of the game’s real strengths. Old point-and-click adventures can sometimes confuse stubbornness with challenge. They ask you to combine things that have no obvious relationship or revisit a room because one tiny detail has changed without telling you why. Tangle Tower mostly refuses that kind of friction. It wants you to keep moving. It wants the mystery to keep breathing.
But there is a trade off. I did not always feel like I had personally cracked the case. More often, I felt like I had followed a well-designed path through it. The game lets you inspect, question, and solve in your own order to a point, but it usually narrows the next step until the answer becomes fairly clear. That makes it welcoming. It also means that the strongest part of the game may not be detective work itself. It may be the pleasure of just spending time inside this strange little world.
Tangle Tower Standouts
The first standout is the detective adventure game loop.
Tangle Tower does not reinvent the point and click adventure. It simply understands why the old format worked in the first place, then removes much of the part where you get stuck for reasons that have nothing to do with the mystery. You move through the tower, look around, pick up clues, talk to suspects, solve a puzzle, and unlock the next piece of the case. The rhythm is clean, and it rarely loses momentum.
The map does a lot of quiet work. It helps you understand the shape of the estate and cuts down on pointless backtracking, but it never turns the investigation into a list of errands. I always had something meaningful to do next, without feeling pushed by a large glowing arrow or an impatient quest marker. That is harder to get right than it sounds.
The rooms help as well. They are not crowded screens full of random objects waiting to be clicked. Each one feels like a small stage with a purpose. You can read the inhabitant through the room before they explain themselves. A piano, a strange collection, an overly neat study, a room that feels too theatrical, too empty, too carefully guarded. The game gives you space to look, but it does not leave you there long enough for curiosity to turn into frustration.
Most of the puzzles are self-contained and understandable. They ask you to notice patterns, arrange objects, connect information, or pay attention to what a character has said. They do not always make you feel like a brilliant detective, but they usually make you feel involved. That mattered to me.
There is one late game sequence involving a small wooden crab that stayed with me the most. Without going into spoilers, it turns the mansion into something larger than a collection of rooms. You carry the object between different places, listen for melodies, uncover symbols, and slowly realise that sounds and objects you had treated separately now belong to the same puzzle. For a brief stretch, Tangle Tower stops feeling like a guided tour through a mystery and becomes a real puzzle box. The whole house begins to speak to itself.
The second standout is the flamboyant cast and the tower itself as a character.
Every room in Tangle Tower has its own music. That sounds like a small thing, but it changes how the mansion lives in your mind. You do not just remember where a person is. You remember how their space in the tower feels. A musical theme returns before the room fully settles into view, and suddenly you are back inside someone else’s obsession or trauma.
The soundtrack reminded me at times of The Addams Family television show. Not because it copies that music, but because it carries the same playful sense that a family can be strange without becoming cruel. The tower has a comic, offbeat Gothic mood. It is full of dark shapes, eccentric costumes, sharp silhouettes, and family secrets, but it never loses its warmth. These are people who are performing themselves very loudly, often because they do not know any other way to be seen.
That idea sits underneath much of the game. The family drama is exaggerated, sometimes almost pantomimed, but there is something more human under those costumes and strange mannerisms. The need to be seen. The fear of being forgotten. The quiet damage that happens when people have lived beside each other for too long without truly being heard.
Grimoire and Sally hold all of this together. Their chemistry is excellent. Grimoire is willing to follow the strange possibility, even when it sounds ridiculous. Sally keeps a firmer grip on the ground, offering dry humour and scepticism without ever making him feel like an idiot. They do not simply trade jokes. Their different ways of looking at the world give the investigation its rhythm.
The supporting cast is broad by design. Hawkshaw, Penny, Poppy, Fitz, Flora, and Felix. Everyone has a clear voice, a clear look, a clear room, and a clear way of trying to control the story around them. Not every character gets the depth they might deserve, but I do not think that is entirely the point. They are written like people in a storybook who slowly reveal that the storybook has been standing on top of something painful.
The tower itself becomes the game’s strongest piece of storytelling. It is not a house in the realistic sense. It is too carefully arranged for that. It feels more like a series of theatrical sets designed by people who keep leaving clues about themselves on every table. Still, I came away remembering those spaces more vividly than many a game I have spent far longer inside.
The third standout is the hint system versus player agency.
Tangle Tower is very good at helping you without making you feel stupid. Its hints are small but clear. Grimoire and Sally might mention someone worth speaking to or point you toward a room without giving you the whole answer. The map, clue system, puzzles, and dialogue all work together to keep you moving.
For a short game, this is a sensible choice. The game respects your time. It does not want you to spend an evening stuck because you missed one tiny hotspot or failed to combine two objects that should never have been connected in the first place. It wants you to enjoy the family, the rooms, the jokes, the music, and the growing picture of what happened.
I enjoyed it truly. I was happy that Tangle Tower did not turn itself into a fight.
Still, this is also where the game feels most limited as a detective story. You can often try clues and evidence without much risk. You can explore in a slightly different order, but you are rarely allowed to follow a completely wrong lead and see where it takes you. The case does not really ask you to form a theory, commit to it, and live with the possibility that you might be wrong.
Instead, the game often leads you to the next required interaction. You find a clue; it points toward a person or location, and the story opens a little further. It is satisfying in the way a well-made adventure game is satisfying. But it is not the same feeling as pulling together a case from uncertain pieces and realising that you have found the answer before the game tells you.
That does not make Tangle Tower a weaker game. It just makes it a different kind of detective game. If Ace Attorney can ask you to challenge the wrong story in front of you, Tangle Tower is more interested in guiding you through a carefully written one. If Duck Detective puts the act of joining the clues together right in the middle of the experience, Tangle Tower spreads its attention wider across place, personality, puzzles, and performance.
The mystery is there. The clues are there. But the strongest feeling is not always that I solved the case alone. It is that I was in good company while the case unfolded, and I loved that.
Who Do I Recommend This To?
I would recommend Tangle Tower to anyone looking for a short, polished mystery with real personality. It is especially easy to recommend if you like colourful point and click adventures, animated storybooks, strange family histories, expressive voice acting, and music that gives every space its own small emotional soundbite.
It is also a good choice for people who enjoy mysteries but do not want to fight with a game simply to make progress. The puzzles are clear, the map is useful, and the hints keep the case moving without constantly taking over. You can finish it over a few relaxed evenings and feel that the game has respected the time you gave it.
I would be more careful recommending it to players who want a demanding detective game where every conclusion has to be earned through their own theory building. Tangle Tower does not often let you make a serious mistake. It does not leave many loose threads in your hands and asks you to decide which one matters. Its detective work is guided, friendly, and carefully authored.
But perhaps that is why it works. Tangle Tower may not give you full ownership of its investigation, but it gives you something else: time inside a beautifully made, musically rich, flamboyantly strange house that I was always happy to return to. By the end, I was less concerned with whether I had become the cleverest detective in the room.
I was simply glad the room existed.
