The Everchanging Tower
Tokoyo: The Tower of Perpetuity is a roguelite 2D platformer where you play as one of five anime characters each with their own reasoning for climbing a mysterious tower that has appeared. The reasoning for this is not as imaginitive as you might think, after a breif backstory from your chosen character you find yourself placed in the tower and the only way forward is up.
Right off the bat Tokoyo has some pretty interesting Design choices. While simple, it has a large colour palette which shows the game as being quite vibrant. The backgrounds outside the tower dont change but have a different colour showing in a neon CRT display-esque feel which is strange but effective. The character models themselves are pretty detailed and follow the standard anime tropes of giving everyone bunny ears and tails. You traverse the mysterious tower by jumping and double jumping your way through hazardous pits whilst avoiding enemies and traps. Gameplay is very simple but for the most part it is centred around avoidance rather than attacking although special abilities are charged once you have built up enough of it to unleash on your foes for a small amount of time. There are abilities which can be collected to enhance some of your most basic skills like Jumping but at its Core Tokoyo: The Tower of Perpetuity keeps it pretty simple.
The bosses for the most part are a mix of dodging and waiting for your skill to charge and unleash it once there is an opening, it is also about learning their attacks, normal enemies can usually be avoided but there are some situations where you will find yourself in a tight spot and unleashing your inner ability is the only way to get through.
The real core of the game which becomes quite apparent early on is the community. Tokoyo: The Tower of Perpetuity is a community focused game. As you traverse the tower you may notice a clock showing a countdown which is an indication as to how long until the Tower resets. Although Tokoyo: Tower of Perpetuity is not an online game it does have a bit of online functionality such as the Tower resets and an online community board so what does this mean?
Well the timer resets are a great way of keeping an average player focused on the Tower before everything resets and the server completely changes the layout for everyone playing the game. Tokoyo: The Tower of Perpetuity will look constantly familiar should you start from the beginning much like other games of this genre, but if you are finding everything a bit too samey then playing for just a few hours and then waiting a full day to go back to it will keep everything fresh. You can even find the tomestones of other players who have died who may have left some sort of helpful key in how to progress further. Whilst similair games focus on replaying the same dungeons over and over again Tokoyo: The Tower of Perpetuity does this by keeping everything new while focusing on the community for support, it really is a great system and not one that I had really expected.
Thanks to a diverse selection of characters and an everchanging layout, Tokoyo: The Tower of Perpetuity is engaging and fun and is great in both long and short bursts and is a great alternative to anyone who has exhausted themselves of other Roguelite games.
A Nintendo Switch code was provided by the publisher
