The titular Tangle Tower, which is not really a tower (a plot point), is a fantastic setting to solve a mystery. Add in the strange object she added to the painting actually being painted with someone’s blood kept in Freya’s paint pot, and you have a very bizarre series of questions to answer. She doesn’t talk, which doesn’t help, but there are further complications by a lack of a murder weapon and Freya seemingly killed right next to the canvas – from a stab to her chest. A young painter, Freya Fellow, has been murdered while painting the manor’s owner, Flora Fellow. You figure out what you’re doing by looking at your case file, and then move over to the scene of the crime after exploring the grounds for awhile. The two have a completely different chemistry from any of Grimoire’s old relationships, Sally able to take Grimoire out of his comfort zone for comedy while being just as observant as he is. He’s now accompanied by Sally from the last game, a former suspect now working as Grimoire’s snarky assistant. Instead of an introductory exposition dump from Officer James and some mystery built by that mysterious girl who always seems to find Grimoire, you just see Grimoire arrive to the scene of the crime in silence. You can tell something is different from just the first scene. During all of that, the team rethought character dynamics, game structure, and puzzle design, resulting in one of the most polished detective games you’ll find out there. The project started shortly after the 2014 release, an attempt to take advantage of the Creative Europe’s funding program for narrative games, got put on hold to make Snipperclips, and finished up after with a two year dev cycle. Tangle Tower is so successful at this that it would invalidate the previous games if not for the fact that it does end up being a direct continuation of the previous game, despite implying otherwise initially. Come 2019, and it turns out they were taking their time, rethinking elements of the previous games and aiming to make something that put the series up to this point to shame. They’ve found a niche for themselves and have been pretty comfortable there, and it seemed like Detective Grimoire didn’t really have a place in there anymore. They’ve mainly been busy on mobile releases, the cutesy Switch co-op puzzler Snipperclips, and the goofily grim house haunting game Haunt the House, nothing particularly memorable but all quite charming and colorful. Five years after Vian brothers tried bringing Detective Grimoire into the commercial indie world, we finally have a sequel.
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