Tower of Art
A downloadable game
Enter the Tower of Art
Somewhere adrift in the Aether is an endless spiralling Tower - and inside it your Traveller awakens. They do not yet recall how they were stranded here, but they do know One Thing.
There is a Door out of the Tower - and they need to find it.
Inspired by Peach Garden Games's Carta system, and by the constantly shifting buildings from Susanna Clarke's Piranesi and the game Control.
Tower of Art is a solo journalling game about a traveller journeying through a surrealist building made from humanity's collective dreams about art and creation. Draw cards to flesh out the Tower as the Traveller searches its infinite rooms for the Clues needed to escape, dealing with eerily familiar landscapes, inkfloods, living colours and much more along the way.
(Note: Physical editions of the game will be available soon via the Twelve Pins Press website)
Purchase
In order to download this game you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $7 USD. You will get access to the following files:
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Comments
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Hey, I've been checking the Twelve Pins Press website for physical copies sinice December. Any update on when we can expect those? Thanks!
Hello, my sincerest apologies for the delay, I have reached out and the Press website will update soon with physical copies - thanks for your interest, I will put in another comment once I confirm they are on the site.
Hello again, thank you for your patience and your interest in physical copies - I have checked with Twelve Pins and they have confirmed print copies are now available on the site. Many thanks and have a great day.
You are an artist, lost within the Tower, a place between places, an ever changing, ever moving, surrealist landscape of Dreams and Art, formed from the Creation of Humanity. Find out why you are here and find out how you can escape.
Tower of Art uses the Carta system by Peach Garden Games. To begin, you choose one card as your Starting Card, and one as your Exit, remove 22 cards from the deck, shuffle in the Exit and lay them down on a 4x6 Grid.
You move your token around the board, answering the prompts, collecting items, resolving encounters, and discovering clues until you can finally find the Exit card. If you've found 4 or more clues, the door will open and you can leave, if not, you'll need to continue exploring the tower until you do.
Every card has it's own individual prompt featuring a wonderful selection of surrealist situations, such as a vulture/printing press hybrid, or books eating words off of other pages. And if you ever need to backtrack, you simply pull another card from the deck and answer that one instead, representing the ever changing nature of the Tower.
And while the set dressing is a bizarro world filled with wonders and nonsense, the true heart of the game is about being an artist and the struggles of making art. What has stopped you from creating? (What has trapped you in this tower?) And what will help you create again? (Where is your Exit?)
The game doesn't explicit state that it's a metaphor for an art block, it's hard not to read it that way. Especially in the current climate where everything seems to be turning against artists and more and more people are giving up on artistic pursuits.
For my playthrough I played as an artist who worked with breaking glass, who felt trapped in their medium after the destruction of one of their pieces and learned that they needed to be able to let go. You can read it HERE
Thanks so much for sharing your comments and playthrough - it was really neat to read through and see what themes you found in it :)