After 70 hours into the game, and watching ParagusRants stream hundreds of it, I find that no review could really do this game justice besides encouraging individuals to download the demo and try for themselves. What may seem like a typical Tower of the Sorcerer game will instead become a rabbit hole in which you will never get out. This game is an investment of your time, your mental capacity, your sanity. You will spend hours making an attempt at one of the many highly difficult towers (levels) within the game, and may find that it was either all for naught or highly rewarding. Failure is expected in many first attempts, but as this is the dark souls of puzzle games, you will find it even more satisfying when you finally reach the end.

Sticking to the puzzle resource management style of DROD RPG and Tower of the Sorcerer, your currency in this game is essentially your health. You want to ensure you make moves that keep your health as high as possible, while considering large trades for stats and other items that may improve your run. While reaching a clear may be thought of as an end-goal, it is your score that will determine what medal and sunstone count you get from the Tower. As you complete one level to your satisfaction, you will find others beginning to open up to you due to a cross-level system called the "Nexus" in which you can spend your medals and sunstones to gain additional stats for every tower.

Not only though is Tactical Nexus an amazing game, but alongside it is a highly thoughtful and educated community. The developers of the game are always responsive on their respect social media, even doing so despite their lack of speaking English. You will find that most players of the game are more than happy to share tips and strategies regarding the game and individual towers, which you may at first consider cheating but will hopefully see in the long-run why the community effort makes it even more enjoyable. I'd highly recommended most players join the connected Discord which you can find within the posts by the developer.

As it stands, Tactical Nexus is the pinnacle of all puzzles on Steam, and you will without a doubt improve your rational thinking and mentality while playing it. I assure you, it is on a level of difficulty you will be surprised with, but it is entirely worth the struggle should you stick with it to the end.

What a strange distillation of a dungeon crawler this is. One health bar, two stats, and a whole mess of keys are your allies, but your only real enemy is your human inability to perfectly run the optimization problem each floor presents you with. Every battle does a known amount of harm and provides you with known rewards and your task is to choose the past that leaves you least harmed in the end.

It's a compelling loop , but it feels almost too much like empty stimulation of the urge to strategize and see numbers go up. When I'm succeeding, it feels fun but in the same way as randomly generating and solving 3-SAT problems might. When I'm failing, it feels like I probably made the wrong microdecision fifty moves ago and it's unclear whether I can ever get back on track.

Maybe the game expands into more depth later on. I'm not even sure if I hope it does: there's a nobility in its minimalism that I admire, even if I don't think I'll be returning to it any time soon.