This game is, and I cannot stress this enough, absolutely gorgeous! The environment design in every new room had me just sitting there marvelling it instead of looking for clues. Fantastic character designs, interesting, funny, and realistic dialogue, a great story, and enjoyable mystery solving mechanic - it's the works, people! Loved this game <3

I have slightly mixed feelings about the ending, but the journey getting there is great fun.

This game is bursting with personality. Every character comes to life between the fantastic voice work, animation, and design. The setting is a joy to explore. The dynamic between the detective and his assistant works so well. I can see why they created a sequel for them.

As far as the mystery part goes, I would give the mechanics of it a B+. It reminded me of Ace Attorney games where most things make sense, but there are a few moments where I was having to guessing what the game wanted me to say or do next to trigger an event/answer a mystery. Unlike Ace Attorney, there are no penalties for getting things wrong. So players have space to brute force things if they ever get truly stuck, but it is tedious enough it encourages players to make educated guesses instead.

If you enjoy the idea of interrogating eccentric personalities to uncover their secrets, I recommend checking this game out.

I played Tangle Tower twice by now, once on Switch shortly after its release and just recently when I saw that there will be a sequel here on Steam.

Tangle Tower is a point-and-click, detective adventure that tells a weird but thrilling story. The riddles are fun to solve while not being very difficult. Its unique (at least when it was released) deduction system is intriguing and gives a lot of options to experiment.

What stands out is the carefully crafted world, with its quirky characters, that all are fully voiced and animated.

Tangle Tower is a classic point-and-click adventure. You click on the screen to explore your environment, move from scene to scene, and solve a variety of riddles, while uncovering the truth behind a mysterious murder.
Its unique game mechanic is a modular deduction/suspicion system in which you can connect 4 elements to make up a sentence that leads to the truth. Usually these riddles aren't very difficult when you already have an idea about the truth yourself beforehand. There might be some outliers though, hard to tell after playing it twice.

You arrive at Tangle Tower to investigate a murder. At first this murder sounds very normal, with one exception: The room was locked and the murder weapon is nowhere to be found. There was only one other person in the room with the victim and I honestly feel like the game didn't really describe why no one suspects them.
However, you quickly find out that the murder is more mysterious than it seems.

The story is fun to explore with its unique characters and its world. However, while the pacing in the beginning is good it suddenly feels like a sprint in the end and I feel like it could have taken itself more time. Especially the ending feels very sudden.

The characters all feel unique and I would have loved to have more conversation options with some of them or even have conversations with more characters together. In the end the options that are there make sense, and, while I'm saying I would have loved more, presenting evidence or character profiles triggers a unique dialogue as well.

Overall I love the story, there are various twists that I didn't see coming and it is one of the few games that actually feels like YOU'RE the detective and not just watching a detective solve the mystery for you. It offers hints a little too generously though, for example when solving a riddle not first try.

The game is created in a beautiful 2D art style. The characters have a simple, cartoon-ish aesthetic with VERY fluid, vivid, hand-drawn, animations that fit the story perfectly.

The environments have a smoother shading with a lot of details. However, important elements are always easy to see, there are no unrecognisable or tiny objects to find. The environments have subtle animations as well, various particle effects but are static otherwise, with some exceptions where riddles lead to changes in the environment.

Tangle Tower's soundtrack is very atmospheric and doesn't feel too repetitive. Each character, and most areas, have a unique theme. Sometimes the transitions feel a bit harsh but it's not a big issue in my opinion.

There is no track that dramatically stood out for me to be honest, however, that might even be a good thing.

All conversations and prompts are voiced, at least in English. Each voice actor did a great job and the voices fit the characters perfectly with their quirks and feelings.

I write this review after my second play-through. So I had no difficulty to play through the game.
However, I think sometimes it isn't clear what prevents you from continuing and that might lead some players to randomly presenting evidence to characters.

The game is fully supported on Steam Deck, however, I felt like the joystick controls where a little harsh so I created my own control configuration using the touch-pads instead, There are also no buttons to open or close any menus so I added some automatic "mouse move to location, click, and return" inputs using Steam which works perfectly.