The Tower is brilliant – and a bit about AI chatbots

The Tower is exactly my kind of thing. It’s a Pico-8 game created by the luminously talented designer Tallywinkle, and I’ve been playing it on-and-off since last week. I think on-and-off is actually the best, and perhaps the only true, way to enjoy this.

And the idea is simple. You’re climbing a tower one floor at a time. Each floor has a staircase that’s generally blocked off by a random-number-generator dice roll of one to 100. If I roll the dice and the number is equal to or higher than the number of the floor I’m on, I can go up the stairs to the next floor. If the number is lower, then the stairs take me down to the floor below and I have to try to go up again.

A few things here. The Tower won me over from the moment that it announced itself via a friend, the dep-ed of Edge, as a game about climbing a tower. This is something I never tire of in games. Crackdown, Arkham, I just love a good tower. But I love this tower all the more because of its chunky pixels and rich, Pico-8 colours – those lurid magentas and neon greens – and the glitchy presentation which sees the colours themselves pied and strobing as ghostly scan lines move up and down, which sees characters and items suddenly pop into existence and then disappear again.

It reminds me, very strongly, of games like Jet Set Willy, the home computer classic in which you set off in a top hat and with a hangover to explore a very strange house. I love that game for its sense of mystery – a sense that there is meaning here, meaning that would enrich my life, but it’s always just out of reach. I didn’t talk to anybody in Jet Set Willy but I spent hours exploring its halls and chambers. I can talk to people in The Tower, but I don’t always learn that much. Instead, it’s always: what’s next? And how does this all fit together? One floor is a grotto. Another is a library, or a dining room, or an attic, with unmistakable pixel-art floorboards. Or a farm. Or a forest.