Tall Twins Tower

Tall: Infinity’s ascetic insistence on clipped chains and limited board manipulation cultivated a severity that perhaps muted its appeal, so Techno Soleil went back to the drawing board and overhauled its core components¹ into something radically different. Instead of awkward stick figures slowly constructing the Tower of Babel, looming over the player on the title screen, Tall Twins Tower pivots to adorable animal-suited characters swimming in the ocean or stacking under a singing moon. The shift is more than mere aesthetic: the two primary protagonists each have an absolutely disgusting level of board control that completely nullifies the austerity of Tall: Infinity’s mechanics. Cat Debinyachi can slide an entire row below them clockwise or counter-clockwise around the cylinder playfield, while rabbit Rabbikyu can lift and shift individual blocks without rotating them in the process.² Without needing to roll blocks onto row ledges to change their orientation, any block slightly off from making a match can now be seamlessly “fixed” to make it work, vastly decreasing the difficulty of finding and preserving chains.

With that in place, the game’s pace and rhythm fundamentally changes towards frantic playfield shuffling, and many of the core variables have been tweaked to enhance the new direction. Surprisingly, the chain timer has actually been lengthened rather noticeably with a major caveat: using the new abilities cuts it back down, potentially ending chains prematurely with overuse. One special move is about all you get for each match in your chain, so actually rending the board with each move isn’t possible. The more viable move, the slide,³ begins to struggle more as the character gets isolated on high plateaus as is common with longer chains, which makes working with what the board organically produces on the bottom layers arguably even more important than its predecessor.⁴ While the slide can flatten walls by forcing rows that jut out back inward to access pieces below, the maneuver is self-defeating (making the structure untouchable outside of its top row) when the player isn’t prepared to shift off their spot for future matches. These elements make chaining non-trivial even with the grand new powers, but these are small counterbalances at best; the game still expects you to clear as many levels as possible in a single 15-move chain.

The balloon indicator swells up and turns red as the chain timer ticks down, a welcome visual adjustment from the vague angel wings of the game’s predecessor. Although Debinyachi is jumping off this growing stack of blocks here, they could just as easily slide the top one to the left and rotate it onto that yellow-topped one for a match. [src]

After a few hours of play, that goal should be achievable for the early stages, pushing the player below the strict one-minute baked-in “best time” for each. Still, the game has a couple more tricks up its sleeve to knock the player out of chains. The first, the one-way blocks, return from Tall: Infinity, rendering certain row edges inert as one-way blocks in inconvenient spots prevent one from shrinking or peeling it back. The more important, however, is a staling mechanic where the block used for a match will begin to fade out of existence after said match. One can still wring a couple more matches out of it with good placement and timing, but abusing a single well-placed block for repeated quick matches is absolutely non-viable past a certain point. Hard mode implements this mechanic for the early game as well, and it becomes apparent that this restriction most exquisitely enforces the need to scour the entire board that the mechanical outcomes in the paragraph above as well as the game’s predecessor both center around.

Keeping in line with the massive chains the game demands and the quick-clears they imply – along with slicing off the eighth stage of the original for a tidier seven – Tall Twins Tower reorients its scoring towards a pseudo-time attack focus. The game’s in-game timer tracks real time in each stage, but it can be decremented when certain actions occur. Double simultaneous matches shave off a whopping 10 seconds, but the real cash cows are one-way blocks, which lop off five seconds per match. Positioning a one-way block right over a long flat stretch and squeezing four or five matches in a row out of it often takes one back down near zero seconds on the clock. These changes not only make the “scoring” more immediate than its predecessor, but they also turn one-way blocks into opportunities just as often as restrictions.