Obscure Games You May Not Have Heard Of - Episode 3, Tall Twins Tower

Goin’ back to the Puzzle Mines again, one of my favorite genres, with possibly my favorite game in that genre. I think Dharma Doujo is #1, but this is a VERY solid #2 (EDIT: This is now prolly my fave), and it’s a game very special to me. And it’s also probably the most obscure game I will EVER talk about on here. It’s so obscure I had to rip the soundtrack myself and upload it. I couldn’t even easily find ISOs of it online, I had to ask my friend who introduced it to me for help.

Friends, may I introduce, the incredible game known as Tall: Twins Tower.

Tall: Twins Tower, which I’ll just refer to as Twins Tower from now on, is actually the sequel to a game called Tall: Infinity, which I will get to later. Twins Tower did not come out in America, possibly because it was a PS1 title released in late 2000 with the unfortunate title of TWINS TOWER and America was a little persnickety in the early 2000s about things with that name.

Twins Tower is a simple puzzle game, as all of the best ones are. It was made by Techno Soleil, who seem to still exist? This was the last game they made, but their website is still up with their logo and has stuff from this year so who the hell knows. (EDIT: They currently make like, water treatment plant software, or dentist software or something. They haven’t made games in 24 years. Though they DO still have their old games on the PSN!) In Twins Tower, you can play as two characters, ラビッキュ (Rabikyu?) the Rabbit, and デビニャッチ (Debinyatchi? I’m new to Japanese) the Cat Boy, each with their own unique Twin Power, as I call it. Bnnuy has Crane, Catboi has Slide.

The game is as follows: You can hold down the button to lock yourself on the block you’re on. Then, by moving left or right, you turn that block. If you push a block against another you can climb up it, offsetting your turning slightly, which can be useful in several instances. If you unlock while your block has colors matching another block its touching, you grow blocks between them. You need to grow a tower in layers, ten layers high. Getting a combo of connecting colors quickly in a row makes blocks spawn all through the level, so the idea is to get big combos! All the while the tower is burning underneath you, destroying blocks, so you gotta go fast!

As I said, the Twins have unique powers. Bnnuy can use Crane, where with a push of a button she will pick up a piece and float into the air with it. Then she can move it left, or right. This allows her to also move it up diagonally, if need be. This doesn’t turn the block, which can be used for precise placements. Unfortunately, I feel Catboi’s power is WAY better, because Crane is a bit slow and clunky. Catboi’s is Slide, where by pressing R and L, you slide the layer you’re on left or right. This also helps with precise placement, and is just so, so, SO much faster.

Later levels throw in a few curveballs. Eventually less colors start to spawn on the blocks, you gotta think your moves out a bit more. Also some blocks spawn only being able to turn in one direction, and in the last few levels, once you clear a block by connecting it with a color, it becomes a fading block, and disappears after a few seconds. Before that it can be a big strategy to just do lots of clear in a row with one block, but it becomes much harder later. The game ramps up in difficulty in a way that’s not a LOT, but quite noticeable. It took me a long time to actually beat it, many attempts, but it was super satisfying when I did. There are seven levels (six on easy, but it never gets the fading blocks and there’s no REAL ending), and can easily be beaten in 12 minutes. Once you get good enough, it becomes your goal to just… grind for time. It even has a scoreboard showing the fastest times.

One of the only flaws I can think about the game is that the game’s ramping difficulty on normal and hard mode ramp to a point where the fire is so fast and the colors are so bad that it makes the panic music play too much, cause those levels have some good normal music but you can’t hear much of it lmao

Tall Twins Tower’s main mode is extremely addictive, and I really cannot stress enough how fun it is. The music is also stellar. Like I said, I ripped it myself. Here, here’s the music for level 5, and also the music for the multiplayer mode, my favorite music from this game.

But that’s not everything, oh no! Every Puzzle game needs a few additional modes, and this game has two others! First we got puzzle mode, where you’re given an already set up tower and a certain amount of moves to clear all the blocks. There are 100 unique challenges, and I’ve done about 65 of them so far, but a lot of them are very, very hard, and there’s no documentation for this game. Maybe some day I’ll make a gamefaqs detailing how to beat every level. I just need an ASCII catboi at the top. If anyone beats all 100 and something cool happens, please let me know.

EDIT: I did this. It took a lot of work, and was very hard, and you get nothing for it. Truly a shame. ): I also looked into the files for this game! There’s no secret 4th character. My life is ruined.

Here’s the multiplayer versus mode, featuring https://www.twitch.tv/ratttz, because she’s the only person who’ll play Tall: Twins Tower with me, and she does it sometimes on her stream. First person to beat the stage wins, GO! But also, each color you clear will send over an effect! And you can then clear a block to counter their effect and send one back to them. Blue makes a bunch of blocks one-way blocks, green boosts your blocks to make them all-one-color blocks, good for lots of clears at once. Yellow is a lightening strike that turns a bunch of blocks into fading blocks. And then the bomb. Oh my god, the bomb. Red makes bombs, and two switches appear. It’s a 50/50, one of the switches defuses the bombs and makes your tower grow, the other makes em explode and knocks you back ages. It’s a NIGHTMARE. But it’s also so, so fun. Someone needs to come to my house and play this with me, because I haven’t been able to play without NullDCBear’s input lag.

If this all sounds like loads of fun to you, then you can go right ahead to Ebay, look this game up, and weep, because it usually goes for several hundred dollars, if it’s going at all. It’s really freaking obscure, like I said. I did, however, manage to find a copy. I imported it from Japan for a nice ¥15,000, which was like 150 bucks, shipping included. Was it worth it? Fuck yes it was, this is one of my favorite games of all time. I couldn’t even find any scans of this game’s manual online. That art is gorgeous! I should scan it sometime and upload it onto here.

EDIT: I did this. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1llm1CqkEKgYiMH9lwV14k1kSQjPoaa34/view?usp=share_link

The day when CD rot takes this game from me will be a day that I cry. Data preservation is important, people.

Anyway, what if for some weird reason you didn’t want to spend 15k yen on an obscure JP only PS1 title, but you still wanted to enjoy this beautiful puzzle game? Well, there is an alternative. Other than Emulation, which is always morally correct. As I said, there was a prequel. And this game DID come out in America… in 2003. Four years after it was released in Japan, and three years after Twins Tower. A 2003 PS1 game is a wild concept to me, but if you look for it online it’s like 5-10 dollars. It’s super duper cheap.

I find Tall Infinity… interesting, but I like Twins Tower way, WAY more. The music isn’t nearly as catchy (only one song plays for all seven levels, though you can choose between like 5 songs to play). The graphics are still really cool and catching, but I like Twins Tower’s cartoony look more. And the gameplay is still good, but there’s no Twin Abilities, and the chain timer is really short. The shorter timer means it’s a LOT longer and more of a struggle. Some people might be into that, but for me the big chains in Twins Tower are good because number go up makes brain meats go brrr. Oh, and the tower burns down in layers, on a timer, instead of one block burning at a time. The stress of excitement of “I CAN STILL SURVIVE THIS” when you have like 5 blocks left that are slowly catching on fire in Twins Tower is REALLY good, but sadly not here.

This doesn’t mean Infinity isn’t worth checking out, mind you. But if this peaked your interest in any way, I highly recommend both of these games, especially Twins Tower. Its infinitely replayable, and just so much fun. I’ve fallen in love with it so much since discovering it earlier this year. It’s kinda become my comfort game. Check it out, let me know what you thought of it, and I hope you’ll check out more of my posts like this~