Over the past week, I played through Deadly Towers, a game that frequently pops up on lists of the worst NES releases. Even after watching a couple of negative videos on it, the game intrigued me. No matter how many bad things I heard, the game looked totally fine. The NES library is littered with games I find nearly unplayable, yet Deadly Towers looked totally competent. What made it so bad, then? I booted it up, expecting to find my answer after a few minutes, but I instead found myself feeling the urge to play more.
I ended up completing the game, and y'know what I found? Deadly Towers is completely okay. It has too many problems for me to call it a good game. Depending on the day I might even call it a bad game. And yet, there's absolutely no part of it that strikes me as criminally awful. It's remarkably cruel, but not remarkably bad. In retrospect, it's so unremarkable that I'm not even going to write a proper review. Instead, I'm going to take a look at some common criticisms that game receives and throw in my two cents on them.
"Deadly Towers is too obtuse"
The number one complaint I've seen about this game is that it's too confusing, and that a normal person could never possibly finish the game without a guide. That's stupid. I'm someone who finds myself using a guide at least once or twice in just about every game when I get stuck, but I didn't need one once for Deadly Towers. I'm guessing this complaint mostly comes from people who didn't read the manual, because the manual outlines literally everything you need to do to beat the game. It even describes every item and gives you a map of the first dungeon.
Admittedly, there's absolutely no reason for all of the dungeons in the game to be behind invisible warp points, but the overworld is small enough that they aren't too hard to find. "Now Renne, that's still bad design," you might say. It is! But for a game heavily inspired by The Legend of Zelda, it's totally par for the course. The only difference in Zelda 1 is that you have to bomb random walls to find secrets instead of moving in zigzags.
The most absurd part of Deadly Towers' design is the comically large dungeons. The more you explore, the more they feel randomly generated. The manual proudly boasts that each dungeon contains around 200 rooms, but about 5 of them are actually relevant. This led to me having an instance of a full hour of dungeon mapping without finding a single shop. Fortunately, exploring every dungeon isn't the slightest bit necessary. I gave up after mapping about 80% of three of them, which gave me enough variety in accessible shops to upgrade my gear enough to continue. The dungeons are certainly the worst part of the game. After a certain point, they feel like they exist only to mock you.
"Deadly Towers is ugly"
I guess you could say that? It looks somewhere in between an early computer game and an NES game. There are certainly garish color choices at times, and the enemy designs are pretty uninspired. Fortunately, sprite flicker isn't a huge issue outside of the dungeons, and even then it's only obvious in certain rooms. Personally, I find that the music goes a long way to relieve any aesthetic woes I have towards the graphics. Plus, Prince Myer's sprite is incredibly cute.
"Deadly Towers is unfair"
This is the most valid argument about Deadly Towers being a bad game. Deadly Towers is an extremely mean video game. It's not quite as mean as something like I Wanna Be The Guy or kaizo Mario hacks, but it's far crueler than most NES games. It's not even a hard video game, since dying doesn't erase any progress. It just likes to mock you.
Enemy placement is consistently stupid. This is especially evident inside the dungeons, where you will inevitably walk blindly into a room and get your health points melted away by instantly colliding with an enemy. In some cases there's no way around this apart from marking it on a map and finding a different route to your destination. Defense upgrades can mitigate this but not entirely remove the potential of instantly dying upon walking through a door.
In the overworld, the situation isn't much better. While there are only a few spots where walking through a screen transition will kill you, each room is spattered with enemies, many of which require instant action to avoid. After taming the initial onslaught, just about every part of the main castle has broken walls that poor Prince Myer will careen down if the slightest enemy collision occurs near them. As an extra "fuck you", extremely fast moving enemies appear in each room, which are almost guaranteed to knock you off the castle if not taken care of before approaching a perilous wall. The game even doubles down on this after a couple of the titular towers are conquered, spawning more and more flying rats, erratic bats, and balls of ash. Most of these can be reacted to in time to avoid a hit, but it's obvious the game has it out for you when a torrent of flying rats race towards your face the second you enter a room.
And of course, there's the meanest part of Deadly Towers: the knockback. The distance a single hit will send you is absolutely ridiculous, often immediately sending you through a screen transition, into another enemy, and back, ping-ponging you until you die. One of the overworld rooms became entirely inaccessible to me after the enemy spawn ramp-up, where two rats and a spark ball instantly assaulted me, flinging me into the previous room. Left, right, and down on the dpad all made me instantly exit the room, and forward or standing still immediately got me hit. Fortunately, the room isn't required, but it held one of the few dungeons I bothered mapping out, cutting off one of my upgrade points.
Strangely enough, the towers themselves present the lowest threat level. Just about every enemy can be reacted to, and the bosses aren't particularly difficult, especially with some potions stocked up. Erratic bats and fast moving ghosts still bother you from time to time, but in the wider areas without broken walls, they're much easier to deal with. As a result, all of the cruelty of earlier areas feels frustrating, but not totally insurmountable. It's mean, but not so much that it made me want to quit.
Where does Deadly Towers' bad reputation come from?
From what I can tell, much of the disdain for Deadly Towers stems from some guy named Seanbaby. I've never heard of the guy, but from what I can discern he's a guy who liked to shit on bad videos games before AVGN popularized the pasttime. Seanbaby listed Deadly Towers as the worst NES game of all time on his website, somehow finding it worse than legitimately broken, bottom of the barrel video games. He's too brief in his complaints about it for me to really even understand what his problem with it is. He even reached out to a producer at Broderbund, who simply said, "I produced the game and it wasn't THAT bad for the times...some of the others are WAY worse." And that's 100% the truth.
Now, we're all entitled to have childhood games that we use as a dead horse to beat and blame for everything bad in life. The problem is, if you're popular online and vocal about something you don't like, its badness becomes fact. People who have never played Deadly Towers will hear the name and think, oh yeah, that's the worst NES game ever made. Content farms will then Google "worst NES games" to make their own lists, play five minutes of Deadly Towers without consulting the manual, and agree with every bad thing ever said about it. They sure as hell aren't going to go and do actual research for their 5 minute clickbait cash-in, so the same handful of games will be repeated as "the worst" ad infinitum based on a handful of people's opinions from two decades ago.
From what I've been able to find, Deadly Towers was also one of those games that sold strangely well, so a ton of people have lingering memories of it. Having come out before Zelda in the US, I'm betting plenty of kids were deeply confused, with no Nintendo Power to help them along. So when they find a list calling it the worst, and they themselves made no progress in it as a child, who are they to argue?
So, is Deadly Towers worth playing?
The sad answer is, despite being one of the first US released console RPGs, there just isn't that much good in Deadly Towers. It's not quite mean enough to find its audience in its cruelty, it's not quite funny enough to laugh at, and it's not quite interesting enough to play on its own merit. Going in, I was expecting overly ambitious kusoge, but instead I found overly ambitious mediocrity. That said, the controls are responsive, it feels fine to play, and it's just mysterious enough to be intriguing. Check it out if you want! I don't own you! I won't be the next Seanbaby! Make your own opinions!
Personally, I think Deadly Towers' biggest crime is giving too few rewards for the amount of effort it takes to play. The dungeons are so sparse that it discourages exploration. The shops often contain the same items, which makes it even less motivating to search for more. Climbing a tower, beating the boss, descending with the bell, and burning it in the fire is legitimately fun. Finding hidden parallel worlds with special items is great. The dungeons just weigh the whole game down into feeling unsatisfying.
If you've played Deadly Towers, let me know about your experience with it!