Timothy and the Tower of Mu Reviews

very fun and challenging precision platformers with light metroidvania elements. you play as a kid who is gonna climb a gigantic tower only armed with a slingshot. its not a particularly short game i expect a minimum of 10 hours blind if your a expert at precision platformers, and dont get lost. but most people will likely end up between 15-25 hours. difficulty is pretty high compeared to most games, but about average for hardcore precision platformers, its in the same league as super meat boy or celeste B stages in terms of difficulty, but less focus on speed, and more focus on precision and patterns. controller is responsive and feels good except for that all buttons are used by thumbs only, 3 buttons for right thumb with no possibily to rebind. overall good game for people who like precision platformers with high challenge level.

So much promise, with great pixel art and a nice soundtrack, only to mess up at the finish line with poor control decisions/execution. I can get over the one jump height - at least we can redirect midair. But, having to let your character come to a complete stop before firing while on the ground is horrible. Also, jumping off of ladders often requires multiple presses of jump for some reason before he does it. Movement is generally slow and feels sluggish, especially while climbing. Lastly, activation hit box for ladders, doors, chests, etc. are extremely small, so you often have to adjust your position multiple times to activate things. I think they should realize that making a high difficulty precision platformer requires equally precise attention to controls, in which case this could be a good game.

Good challenging and creative game, essentially boils down to precise platforming and inputs. The game is certainly difficult from room to room but there are many checkpoints so you don't have to worry about losing progress. The combat and use of the slingshot can be rough to get used to, especially not being able to move and shoot while standing. It is my opinion that you should either be able to move and shoot or control the height of your jump by how long you press the jump button for to provide the player with just a little more flexibility in how they approach combat. Still a great game regardless. Added Comment: This is a message for the developer, I encountered a bug in which I saved the game while being chased by an enemy and every time I spawn I get insta-killed by the enemy and can no longer continue the game. https://streamable.com/qgu6hh This is a link to a video of the bug. I would very much appreciate some help resolving this if possible as I would not like to restart or other players to experience this.

The pixel art and music work well for this game and it's pretty enjoyable however there are some problems that seriously detract from it. Jumping feels slightly floaty and slingshot shooting requires either being stationary or mid-air and has a delay that makes shooting consistently annoying. Drop rates for gold and cooking ingredients are pretty bad - presumably you cook recipes to give to various pigmen for rewards but it requires an excessive amount of ingredients and requires grinding monsters to complete one. To make it worse, cooking one recipe is required for progression and you can't buy most of the ingredients, requiring you to kill monsters until you get the rare drop to see if it's the ingredient you need then kill them until it drops four more times. This segment was very poorly designed. A few bosses have some ways to cheese because you can stay by their weak point with little to stop you from quickly killing them. Achievements are in-game only and are a bit buggy (I did the final boss hitless twice but the achievement popped only on the second time). It's a shame because I want to recommend this game but I suspect a lot of folks will find it frustrating for the controls and annoyances with insta-kill pits or traps along with the above reasons.

This could have been a very fun NES-like throwback game if the shooting controls weren't so horrible. Firing the slingshot on the ground requires YOU to first manually come to a complete stop (as opposed to having shoot inputs making your character briefly stop moving as most games would). As if that weren't bad enough, trying to shoot at any time - whether on the ground or midair - is merely a suggestion. The game often decides to completely ignore your input, leading to pointless damage and deaths. Should this problem ever be fixed, then I would flip my recommendation right around, but as of the time of this writing, it's just too unreliable to be fun for me. (For the record I'm using a hardwired XBox controller that has no problems functioning in multiple other games.)