Towerfall is the Best Game

          A dim basement somewhere with shag carpeting. Staying up late for the third night in a row with no chance of stopping. Playing till your thumbs twitch, anticipating moves you haven't thought of yet. Words fail to capture the love I have for game nights as a kid. Memories of spilled sodas and playing till the mythical hour of 2am; of arguing strategies and dodging controllers thrown by sore losers. I hope you have at least one of these memories to draw upon. For me Towerfall is the freshest entry in a dusty drawer marked FUN.

          As I played Towerfall for the first time I felt nostalgia. And I hated it. Not hate for the game, but hate that nostalgia is the best word for an experience I crave daily. Towerfall is a game made with distilled retro love and childlike glee. To understand it you have to go to the beginning.

It takes a Village 

           We start with Matt Thorson, Canadian, playing classics like Legend of Zelda and Bushido Blade blade for the first time. Minimalistic storytelling and competitive camaraderie lodge in his heart. In the early 2000s Matt codes his first full games called Jumper and Dim in Game Maker. Here a sadistic streak for subtle difficulty and a healthy love of platformers starts to form.

           Towerfall takes its first steps in a game jam in 2012 with the help of Alec Holowka, now of Night in the Woods fame. They develop one weapon, a bow and arrow, for a zelda-style platformer and get so enthralled by it that they scrap the other weapons entirely. But the game doesn’t begin to sprint until Indie House.

          Indie House was an indie dev commune in Vancouver, known for its frequent parties to beta test whatever the inhabitants were working on at the time. Towerfall heavily owes Indie House for shaping it from a platform climbing solo experience into the party game it was destined to be. At times Indie House holds four developers working day and night on this project. They tweak and perfect it as partygoers and professionals alike shoot, blow up, bop, and bramble each other with reckles abandon. Indie House and Towerfall inexorably shape each other. Fun, frantic, and charming describe them both.

          Matt signed an exclusive deal with Ouya in 2012, an experimental console that retrospectively owes much of its meager success to Towerfall. This decision marks the game as indie, free to play, and for invested nerds.

See if you can follow all the things happening here

          Towerfall’s lack of online play lets the game focus on what it does best- creating a shared experience for those in the room. It is composed of personal stories. A spectacle unique each time with some new twist of fate or hidden detail marking the night. Years after its launch I can't say if I'm any more skilled than when I first picked up an Ouya just to play it. But when I play it now it is with the familiarity of old friends. Of friends I've played with, friends I'm playing with now, of the hundreds of hands that touched it during its creation and feedback, and of Matt himself who shines through at every corner. You'll find love and late nights ingrained in every pixel and chippy note, every polished animation and decadent detail. A community made this game and it takes a community to enjoy it.

          And that is why Towerfall is a perfect game.

But What is it?

          Towerfall is a local multiplayer 2D platformer with simple mechanics but a lifetime to master. It features pixel art by Miniboss and a rocking soundtrack by Alec Holowka. The core game features 2-4 players as they shoot arrows, dodge, activate power ups, and stomp on each others heads until one remains. Dozens of special arrows, field obstacles, game modifiers keep it fresh for hundreds of hours. On top of that timed target practice modes and cooperative quest modes only compound on the fun. The Dark World expansion added 10 new playable characters and another quest mode with bosses and revives complete with 4 new maps. An official mod for the Windows version has stretched maps and support for up to 8 players.
          Towerfall is available on most operating systems, PS4, PS vita, Xbox One, Switch, and - if you can find one - the Ouya.

          Towerfall’s shining influence is reflected in all of the games that came out of Indie House in some way or another. If you liked Towerfall check out Celeste, Night in the Woods, Ikenfell, and Wandersong.