Der Geisterturm Review
It’s wonderful how many people can make video games. For as many weird, sometimes repulsive, creations as there are, it’s fantastic that we can have creators from around the world bringing their ideas to life, ideas like “man with cool jacket rocket-punches robot invasion to death” or “clueless outsider takes over business in town that will be dead in 21 days.” Plus, it doesn’t hurt that most of them have a comparatively short run time, making them easier to fit into my busy life. When I was deciding which game to review this week, an indie game titled Der Geisterturm impressed me with its creative design choices and commitment to a theme, so I decided to take a look.
In Der Geisterturm, or The Ghost Tower for you English speakers, players take on the role of Echo, an amnesiac who pilots a combat robot. After the game’s tutorial, which is Echo’s training for combat robot operation, Echo wakes up in a mysterious facility knows as the Turm de Wiederkehr. Though it’s called a tower, it’s actually 500 meters underground. Soon after waking, Echo receives a call from someone calling themselves Kai Albrecht. Kai claims that the Turm de Wiederkehr is where soldiers come back from the dead, implying that the reason Echo has no memory is due to having been killed, and states that Echo must fight through all 15 floors of the Turm de Wiederkehr as a sort of test. Along the way, players will improve both by finding improved equipment as well as gaining skills through combat.
The thing that initially caught my eye about Der Geisterturm was its visual style. There have been plenty of games in the past that have used graphical features to conceal limitations of one kind or another, such as the fog in Silent Hill being used to conserve processing power by limiting what was on screen, and Der Geisterturm has a similar idea. The graphics are a limited wire-frame style with only a few colors, presumably to compensate for limited production time, budget, and/or staffing. But what’s clever about Der Geisterturm is that the game provides a perfectly reasonable explanation for this: Because Echo is entombed in a suit of battle armor, they only thing the player sees is the sensor readouts of the suit. This great commitment to theme is spread throughout the entire game and it’s probably the coolest part of Der Geisterturm. The player’s movements and actions are all very slow and heavy, but that’s obviously because the player is inside a massive battle robot so of course they aren’t quick or agile. Beyond that, actions such as switching weapons, reloading, and moving, all actions that would be laborious in a large robot, all consume a full turn once combat has begun, but smaller things such as changing weapon fire modes or activating the suit’s shield can be done freely as they require little to no movement from the heavy suit, only a quick button press from the pilot within. The one thing that doesn’t really fit with the theme is that rotating to face a different direction doesn’t consume a full combat turn, as it seems to me like that’d be a bit time consuming in the robot, but I think that would have made the game too difficult.
On the subject of difficulty, Der Geisterturm suffers from an over-commitment to being a challenging game. The biggest problem is the game’s health system. Players have two health stats: HP or Health Points, a reflection of how healthy the human pilot is, and DC which stands for Durability Count. DC is a representation of how well the metal combat suit is holding up. Once it dips low enough, holes have begun to appear in the armor and HP can be reduced by enemy attacks. However, if either HP or DC is reduced to zero, the game is over so players must maintain both. Maintaining these numbers is a real trick, as HP only ever went as high as 50 in my experience and the player’s maximum DC is reduced each time they visit a repairs station to fully replenish HP and DC. I never figured out the formula, but the game states that maximum DC is reduced after a repair session based on how much damage the suit had taken up to the point of repairs. This slow attrition of player health, along with the game’s limited ammo and unlimited enemies, made me incredibly frustrated while playing Der Geisterturm. I get that many people like challenging games, but this combination of mechanics can very easily lead to a situation where, because players made a mistake early in the game, they end up in an unwinnable scenario several hours later and are unable to remedy this. Add to this Der Geisterturm’s one save file policy and if players make enough mistakes, they could be 10 floors in only to realize their only way of progressing is to start an entirely new game, and that sort of thing just doesn’t fly with me.
On top of being persistently punishing, Der Geisterturm also suffers from a few less serious but still unfriendly design choices. The first time I played this game, I was unaware that there were computers that contained supplemental tutorials as well as world-building fiction scattered throughout the game. This is because the game never makes any mention of this. I saw what I thought were odd wall-mounted lights, as the limited graphics represent computers as slightly larger lights on the wall, but it turns out they were computers that could be interacted with. Pickups, such as ammo or upgrades, suffered in a very similar way. Not only were they small, presumably because of the suit’s own large proportions, but they were colored a slightly lighter gray than the environment, making them hard to see. I would have preferred they be a more noticeable color, or at least outlined or highlighted by the suit’s sensors as missing these things is fairly perilous for the player.
I think there are some genuinely cool ideas in Der Geisterturm. The way it makes players feel as though they are actually the pilot of a ponderous metal soldier and the clever use of graphics are great, I just wish that some different design choices had been made. However, the choices that bother me are so core to the game’s design, it makes me think that actually this game is good, just not good for me. Der Geisterturm is a well-built harrowing crucible of metal and death, which might be exactly what you’re looking for, but I think the odds are against it so pick it up on sale just in case.
Buy this game on sale
It’s worth playing, just not at the price they’re asking
