It stinks!

The Deadly Tower of Monsters isn't a parody of schlocky low-budget games, at least it's not only that. It's more a parody of schlocky low-budget films, reveling in poorly-written dialog, lazy scene-setting, and low-quality special effects.

As such, it might not be as painfully anti-fun as Matt Hazard's intentionally-bad gameplay, but Deadly Tower still represents an epic self-petard-hoisting. It's a send-up of shitty content, and all of its content... is shitty.

This isn't to say that the game's problems are limited to flat characters and trope-y enemy designs. Button-mashy combat is dull even when it works, and it frequently doesn't work due to loose-feeling input and janky-ass camera movement. But mechanical shortcomings like those could have been "part of the joke" if the game's sense of humor was a strong-enough enticement to keep moving forward.

Unfortunately in-game events aren't absurd enough, or winking-at-the-camera enough, to be genuinely funny. They're just bad.

It's a shame, because in theory the game's "DVD commentary" narration is a great gimmick: an elegant way for a voice-over to explain your current objectives while simultaneously providing colorful jabs and musings. In practice, though, those jabs are woefully uninspired (like a remark about animal actors flinging their feces) and the musings are too few and far between.

Progress: Got "to" the tower, I think?