Recommending Pandora's Tower (wii)

I remember back when this was first released I'd seen trailers and was vaguely interested, but I never ended up buying it in the end. I acquired a copy recently and decided to give it a try. I ended up being incredibly drawn in by the story and world, and found the gameplay very enjoyable too. I'm fairly certain there's a lot of people out there who would love this game, and feel the need to spread the word about it!

The game follows the story of a young couple named Elena and Aeron in a fantasy kingdom. Elena is carrying some kind of curse, which will eventually turn her into a monster. In order to stop this, Aeron (the player character), must kill 12 creatures and bring back their hearts for Elena to eat. Once she's eaten all 12 hearts, we are told, the curse will be lifted. Eating the hearts of lesser monsters will hold the curse back in the meantime.

The way the story impacts the gameplay is that the whole game is on a timer. You have to periodically go back to home base to interact with Elena and give her monster flesh to eat. Depending on how long you leave it, she will be in various stages of the transformation, and if you leave it too long she will completely transform, resulting in a game over. This simple mechanic, combined with the large number of different interactions with Elena over the course of the game honestly had me really invested in the story, and caring for the characters quite deeply by the end.

The gameplay is basically a series of 12 zelda dungeons. The towers where the beasts live are like giant puzzle boxes which you solve from the inside, with a bossfight at the end. The main difference with zelda is that you don't get items in each dungeon - instead you have one incredibly versatile item which is used throughout the game in combat and puzzle solving: the oraclos chain. This item is basically a hookshot with extra versatility. The first tutorial shows you how to grab an enemy with the chain and yank on it to do damage. Later you'll learn to tie enemies to other enemies/objects, pick enemies/objects up and throw them at other things, swing from or zoom to points in the environment, and more. All of this controls wonderfully with the pointing controls on wii, and is used well in the puzzles and combat.

The boss fights put the chain to particularly good use. One of my favourite examples is a kind of moving tree monster which tries to move into a patch of sunlight to heal. You have to grab it with the chain and pull it out of the sunlight. You can also pick up debris to stun it, and attach it to pillars around the room to get some hits in while it tries to untangle itself.

The game has a great atmosphere, with good environment design. The towers where you find the beasts are at the centre of an enormous chasm, suspended by enormous chains attaching them to the walls of the pit. It's an incredibly striking design and is visible from various places in the home base area.

I could go on but hopefully I've sold some people on it by now. I have some complaints too, mostly to do with the gameplay being a little janky at times, and the writing/voice acting not being as good as it could be. None of these were enough to stop me from being completely drawn in though, and by the end I really cared about their plight and wanted to see how it would all end.

I hardly ever see this game mentioned and I don't really know why. If you still have a wii/wii U or an emulator for either, please give this a try - it doesn't deserve to be as forgotten as it is!

Here's a trailer for the game - https://youtu.be/YuLlWaRxdSo