Lucky Tower Ultimate Review — Naked, Not Afraid

You’re walking along the twisted and mysterious dark-stone halls of an ancient tower. In one hand, you wield a golden sword, granted to you by a genie’s wish and polished to a near-perfect sheen, even despite the chips and wear of countless battles still present on the blade. In your other hand is a leek. You’re missing two teeth, you’re in your underpants, but a steel kettle hat is on your head, so you feel pretty safe. You’ve slain countless goblins, solved tricky riddles, and made bargains with a mysterious demon to make it this far. Nothing can stop you now.

Suddenly, a shrieking lunatic with a comically large hammer runs up behind you, squashing you flat with one hit. You are dead. You awaken back at the top of the tower, naked. Your adventure begins again.

What I have just described is Lucky Tower Ultimate, a creative roguelite title that has exploded in popularity on Steam and social media platforms since it left Early Access last week. Built around its hand-drawn art and cartoony slapstick comedy, Lucky Tower Ultimate stands out from other titles in the genre and easily deserves the title of one of the best roguelikes you can find, even with its comparatively simplistic gameplay.

Simplistic gameplay might be putting it lightly. Lucky Tower Ultimate has some of the most straightforward mechanics in the genre: you walk left or right, jump, and attack with whatever item you have equipped. You have two hands, each capable of carrying one item that you can swap between them, and several spots on your body where you can wear clothing. You can throw anything in your hands and equip certain items to your body when they’re held.

That’s essentially it. There are no special combos, no dodge button, and nothing to modernize the gameplay beyond the most simplistic of platforming games out there. There is, of course, roguelike procedural generation to the layout of the tower and the loot you find, but that’s about as complicated as things get.

This surface-level simplicity hides a deeper complexity that comes not from complicated mechanics, but from the sheer variety of items and interactions present in the game. Lucky Tower Ultimate focuses its attention on allowing you to pick up and use essentially everything in the game as a weapon. Many of these items have further interactions with other objects or characters in the tower as well, which you have to discover for yourself.

Discovery is the core of Lucky Tower Ultimate, with the game explaining, basically, nothing to you. It is completely up to the player to discover what different objects, items, or interactive elements in the tower do. You learn entirely by doing, and there is a surprising amount to learn, keeping the game constantly fresh and inviting to a curious mind.

Beyond this supreme sense of discovery, Lucky Tower Ultimate thrives with this just absolutely excellent cartoon humor. Slapstick violence is paired with witty yet outright silly dialogue, which makes every moment in the tower feel less like a game and more like an interactive episode of The Simpsons or a vibe I personally felt a lot in Futurama. The comedy isn’t challenging to understand; it’s not going for shock humor, but it’s still outrageous and silly, and it really draws you in, especially with its cast of unique characters.

Discovering everything the game has to offer, be it a new mechanical interaction that helps you to proceed to the next floor of the tower or simply some joke you haven’t seen before, really makes every run feel different from the last. This is something a lot of roguelike games claim, but Lucky Tower Ultimate executes this fantasy by just filling the game with tons of new stuff rather than relying on procedural generation solely for its sense of variety. You genuinely will find new jokes, animations, and characters with each playthrough, and it’ll take you a long time to really familiarize yourself with everything the game has to offer.

It’s because of this slapstick cartoon humor and this insane amount of variety that Lucky Tower Ultimate manages to avoid the annoyance of a death loop. I genuinely found myself amused each and every time I died, impressed by both the wacky death animation and, oftentimes, surprised by what killed me. Instead of dying to the same difficult mechanics over and over again, it really felt like I was discovering something new each time, and I took that information into my next run.

What I’m basically trying to get at is that Lucky Tower Ultimate focuses on the substance of its world rather than the complexity of its gameplay. By having such simple mechanics, the game is allowed to do a whole lot more with them: each item you find can play a surprisingly vital role towards escaping the tower, or it could simply be the source of a new joke you didn’t experience before. The constant influx of humor, with tons of characters both speaking and silent, and lots of little intricate interactions sprinkled throughout the game, really makes Lucky Tower Ultimate feel like a fully-fledged interactive experience rather than another roguelike that’ll show its entire hand to you within ten to fifteen runs. Lucky Tower Ultimate is great, utterly unique, and sure to charm you, even if it tackles things a bit differently than you’d usually prefer.

Try Hard Guides was provided a Steam code for this PC review of Lucky Tower Ultimate. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Lucky Tower Ultimate is available on Steam.