Deadly Towers (NES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
252A playthrough of Brøderbund's 1987 NES game, Deadly Towers.
For the full review, complete with screenshot archive and soundtrack, be sure to check out http://www.nintendocomplete.com/deadly-towers
I think this is probably the fourth or fifth time I've finished this game over the years. It doesn't get any easier, no matter how many times I play it though.
The real key to getting through this is a pad of graph paper. If you carefully map out the overworld and the different towers, through trial-and-error, you can eventually get a grip on where everything is and start out for real. In that respect, it's not so much unlike many games from the same time period - Metroid, Zelda, Castlevania II: all of these had initially confusing layouts, and you left it to you to figure out which way was up. Deadly Towers tries that, but thanks to an utter lack of visual cues to differentiate different areas coupled with a hideously over-complicated set of mazes (that you enter out-of-nowhere if you don't realize that you're standing on the concealed entrance) make for an awful lot of frustration, even for a game of its time. If you forgive it for that though and take it as yet another thing learned while playing, the exploration bit can be a lot of fun here.
For context, let me qualify my feelings on the difficulty this way: Milon's Secret Castle has nothing on this game. Whether that warms you to it or warns you from it, fair enough. It can be fun, but a lot of times the issues really are just too much to put up with. Other times you'll find yourself happily overlooking the flaws because you get it as it was intended and you're enjoying it. I liked it enough to get through it, quite a few times, but is it an enduring classic? Absolutely not. Was it a good game when it came out? Not really. Is it worse than Hydlide? No.
But the most important question: is it worth your time over hundreds of other quality NES titles? Probably not.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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