Twisted Tower puts you at the bottom of an abandoned 1950s resort and asks you to shoot your way to the top to save the woman you love. Between you and her: corrupted fairy-tale mascots, deadly traps, and an arsenal of weapons that includes a whack-a-mole mallet and a chain-gun that fires bubblegum.
It’s from Atmos Games — Thomas Brush, previously of Pinstripe and Neversong — published by 3D Realms after roughly five years of development. And the comparison everybody reaches for is BioShock, which is fair as a starting point and badly incomplete as a description.
Five Floors, Five Moods
The level design drew consistent praise for a specific reason: each floor feels like an actual place with its own mood rather than the same corridor wearing a different texture. One player described the world as colourful, funny, gross, unsettling and genuinely beautiful — often all in the same room.
Navigation is unusually clean too. Multiple players noted never once feeling lost or unsure where to go next, which, as one pointed out, doesn’t happen by accident.
The Loop
Rubber-band pistol, dart-throwing Tommy gun, farting shotgun, bubblegum chain-gun, sniper slingshot, skull-popping ray gun. Punchy and impactful throughout.
Collect tickets as currency and upgrade weapons with damage, reload speed and alternative fire modes.
Bizarre toys grant jumping, dashing and grappling. The movement gets meaningfully better as the game hands you more tools.
Alternate routes, secrets, hidden areas and environmental detail. The game rewards curiosity and offers different paths per playthrough.
It Feels Handmade, and That Matters
The technical side supports it. Sound design and music were praised in almost every account, the gunplay feels impactful, and reports of bugs are rare and cosmetic when they appear at all. One player ran it at 75–100 FPS on Ultra on a handheld with an external GPU; it’s also Steam Deck Verified, with full controller support, rebindable keys, toggle sprint and a slide.
The BioShock comparison earns its place through atmosphere rather than imitation — environmental storytelling, strange footage playing in the background, the slow business of working out where you actually are. Several players reached for CarnEvil as the other reference point, which gets at the arcade-shooter carnival energy running underneath.
The One Design Problem Worth Fixing
That’s the criticism we’d put in front of Atmos first, because everything around it is working. The weapons themselves are inventive and satisfying; they just aren’t arriving when the game most needs them to.
Other Rough Edges
The tonal point is worth expanding on, because it genuinely divided people. One reviewer found the comedy-to-sincerity swing to be the game’s greatest strength; another found it left the story unable to commit. Both are fair readings of the same script, and which camp you land in will shape how much the writing works for you.
Voice acting split the same way. Several players were pleased to find it there at all and thought it improved the note-heavy storytelling considerably; one found the delivery unconvincing. There’s a lot of it either way.
The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly
| The Good | The Bad | The Ugly |
|---|---|---|
| Five Floors That Feel Like PlacesHotel, waterpark, clown casino, carnival forest and space station — each with its own mood rather than one corridor reskinned. Colourful, funny, gross and beautiful, often simultaneously. Navigation is clean enough that players never report getting lost. | Weapons Don’t Match EncountersNew enemy types arrive built around specific counters, and the game doesn’t hand you those weapons. One reviewer spent much of the run still using the starter gun. A straightforward unlock-pacing fix. | Tonal WhiplashThe script swings between quirky one-liners and genuine fear without settling. Some players called that range the game’s greatest strength; others found it unable to commit. Same script, opposite conclusions. |
| Inventive, Punchy ArsenalWhack-a-mole mallet, rubber-band pistol, dart Tommy gun, farting shotgun, bubblegum chain-gun, skull-popping ray gun — ridiculous in a way that never stops being fun, with ticket-funded upgrades and alt-fire modes. | Readables and Collectibles DragStory delivered through pickups stalls a fast shooter, and hunting loot by popping every balloon gets tiring quickly. Both actively fight the pacing the combat establishes. | Empty Rooms and Cheap DeathsA number of areas have nothing in them, and the platforming sections and traps were the only cause of death for one player — unfair rather than challenging. |
| Genuinely HandmadeFive years of work, and it shows. Not committee-designed, not focus-tested into mush — a complete adventure with a real ending, a strong point of view and the confidence to be weird. Excellent sound, near-bug-free, Steam Deck Verified. | Uneven AnimationSome character animation is noticeably stock, which stands out sharply against art direction this considered. The one place the seams show. | More Thriller Than HorrorNot a flaw, but an expectation issue. Regular horror players reported not being scared — while still arguing about the ending days later. Know which you’re buying. |
The Verdict
Blast through this twisted 1950s theme park with visceral combat and clever puzzles that keep you engaged from start to finish. Twisted Tower is one of the more confident indie shooters of the year, and its problems are almost entirely fixable pacing decisions rather than anything structural.
What it gets right is atmosphere and craft. Five floors that each feel like somewhere real, an arsenal of gloriously stupid weapons that stay fun, sound design that carries the whole thing, and a world that’s colourful and grotesque and sincere all at once. The BioShock comparison is fair but limiting — this establishes its own identity within minutes.
What holds it back is rhythm. Weapon unlocks that don’t track the enemies they’re built for, readables and collectible hunts that stall the momentum, and stretches of empty space between the good bits. None of it is fatal, and most of it is patchable.
The honest read: at $14.99 for four to seven hours of this, buy it. It’s a complete single-player game made with visible care by people who wanted to make something specific, and the market doesn’t produce many of those any more.
Go in expecting a thriller rather than a scare machine, take your time, look behind things, and — as one player advised — try the weapon that sounds too stupid to be useful.
Five years well spent. We’d happily take more like it.
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Score Breakdown
