Games Like Project Tower Are Pushing the Industry Forward

Project Tower, a new an indie game from French developer Yummy Games Studio, defies simple genre classification. At its core, it's a third-person shooter. Still, everything from the unique and purposefully vague narrative to the gameplay mechanics and setting make it difficult to pin it down to one category. More than anything, Project Tower feels like an amalgamation of so many different experiences, and the fact that it works as cohesively as it does is a testament to Yummy Games' abilities as a developer.

Project Tower starts with an ambiguous monologue – likely from the game's protagonist – about how an extraterrestrial force invaded Earth and made humanity disappear. A human man is ripped from his home and abducted before waking up on a strange alien world, clad in a blue prisoner's jumpsuit and sporting a sleek new sci-fi helmet. You control that man while a disembodied voice urges you forward. Before long, you find yourself combating grotesque alien life forms and traversing surreal and oppressive environments.

As the game continues, it's explained that your character is merely cannon fodder, being forced to fight their way up the titular Tower to test the tactical and combat efficiency of the levels inside. These tests will determine whether or not the levels are difficult enough to train the invading alien force's military. You are a prisoner, whittled down to little more than the alien script on your jumpsuit, which you cannot even read.

This kind of intentional haziness in the story forces you to question every entity you cross paths with in the Tower. Most are hostile, some are not, but all are a mystery. While never directly explained, you are given a special power to morph into these creatures and experience the world as they would. It’s not a freeform mechanic—it appears only during specific set pieces—but it introduces clever shifts in gameplay, impacting traversal, platforming, and combat.

The interesting morphing abilities mesh with the combat encounters to create an experience quite unlike most other games on the market now.

And that’s where Project Tower really shines: the combat. Project Tower is a bullet-hell, so most of the enemies you face will have a projectile attack that launches large, glowing orbs at your character. Much like the modern Doom entries, movement is key as you circle arenas, dodging and dashing your way around the perilous spheres. Energy blasts come from all angles while you chip away at your opponents' health with a plethora of different firearms. Meanwhile, melee-based enemies will close the distance, attempting to stagger you so the surrounding projectiles will deal more damage.

Project Tower can sometimes be damn hard, especially when the bosses rear their ugly heads, but none of the deaths ever feel cheap or unearned. Each time you die is a learning experience for the next attempt, and the ultimate reward is working your way up the Tower and solving the mystery of why you're stuck running these trials in the first place. The interesting morphing abilities mesh with the combat encounters to create an experience quite unlike most other games on the market right now.

While simply progressing through the game may not seem like the most enticing of rewards, Project Tower's art direction more than makes up for any potential letdown. Everything in Project Tower is creatively alien, from the entities you fight to the weapons you use. Strange markings adorn the massive walls of these worlds, inhabited by creatures just familiar enough to be recognized as hostile but bizarre enough to hit the danger centers of your brain.

The environments are fantastical and strange, from huge labyrinths deep in an alien desert to the dark depths of some otherworldly ocean, surrounded by incomprehensible horrors and dangerous ancient ruins. Between each floor is a grayscale liminal space, surrounded by an endless and empty void. While there is some semblance of life in these liminal spaces, they only add to the mysterious catastrophe of Project Tower's world.

You can feel the creativity in every new enemy, every mechanic, and every moment of eerie silence.

This isn't a perfect experience; sometimes the hit boxes can be a little buggy, the platforming isn't always as intuitive as it could be, glitches occasionally require a restart, and the voice acting can leave much to be desired. Taking the game's scale and the size of its development studio, however, these issues fade into the background.

Games like Project Tower are pushing the envelope, expanding the limits of what video games can be. It isn't necessarily the best game ever made, but the unique blend of third-person action and bullet-hell gameplay mixed with the astounding vistas, an imaginative story, and a genuinely awe-inspiring world combines to feel like something most modern big-budget companies would never dare to try. You can feel the creativity in every new enemy, every mechanic, and every moment of eerie silence.

Project Tower makes you want to see it through to the end, if for no other reason than to see what new and interesting locale or monster waits around the corner. The unfettered and impressive creativity found within Project Tower is an excellent example of the boundary-pushing ethos represented by today's indie development scene, and we all need more of that.