Past meets present: Mystery Tower
Or, The Tower of Babel, as it was originally known in Japan, where it stayed for nearly 40 years before finally releasing worldwide on Nintendo Switch Online.
This column is “Past meets present,” the aim of which is to look back at game franchises and games that are in the news and topical again thanks to a sequel, a remaster, a re-release, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
In the 1980s, Namco was known for their fantastic and influential arcade output. The same company somehow managed to rattle off releases like Galaxian, Pac-Man, Pole Position, Galaga, Dig Dug, Xevious, The Tower of Druaga, and Dragon Buster one after the other, each wildly commercially successful in their own right, or, at the least, the foundations upon which genres were built. Namco was also known for converting these arcade properties into home console games — good ones, too, some of which were a bit limited for one reason or another due to hardware differences, but in many cases, with those limitations in mind and handled during development.
Tower of Babel — renamed as Mystery Tower in 2023 for international release, likely owing to the existence of other games named Tower of Babel outside of Japan — kind of split the difference: it’s a 1986 Namco developed-and-published release, made for the Famicom, that was eventually ported to the Japanese home computer, the X68000, as well. The gameplay is arcade-like in nature — if you played this and were told it was a conversion of an arcade game, you’d really have no reason to suspect you were being lied to about that. But it wasn’t! It was a home exclusive, an attempt by Namco to make a game specifically for the system that housed so many of their arcade conversions. Which also ended up making it something of a missing piece of their history for decades: the vital Namco Museum series has been almost exclusively devoted to home ports of arcade games, platform generation after platform generation, so a game that was actually made for the home, even if it was one in the spirit and from the era of so many of Namco’s arcade hits, wasn’t going to be included there. And it took until the Wii U for it to receive a Virtual Console release, but even then, it was still a Japanese exclusive.
In 2020, Namco released Namcot Collection for the Switch. The idea here was to fill in that very gap in their history, by including the various Famicom conversions of arcade ports in one place, while also including some of Namco’s Famicom exclusives in the mix — not just games they developed, but also ones that they published in Japan, such as Atlus’ Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei. The Japanese Namcot Collection is sprawling: there are 33 titles, and the setup is a lot like Capcom Arcade Stadium, in that the Namcot Collection “game” is more like an app with a hub screen that displays the games you’ve purchased for the collection. It’s a digital shelf, and Famicom game cases go on the shelf when you buy them from the Switch’s eshop, whether individually or in package deals.
The North American version of Namcot Collection was localized and released as a multi-platform title: Namco Museum Archives, of which there is a Vol. 1 and Vol. 2. It shelved the… shelf… and instead went for a straight scrolling menu like the one found in the same console gen’s more standard Namco Museum release. It also removed quite a few games from the mix, including, but not limited to, Tower of Babel. The why of that was a bit unclear — sure, an untranslated version of Digital Devil Story wasn’t going to do a lot of English-speaking people much good — but Tower of Babel doesn’t require knowledge of Japanese to play or succeed at. It wasn’t the lone questionable cut from the bunch, but it stood out enough that I put it on the short list of games to eventually pick up with a Japanese Switch account for the Namcot Collection app, along with the likes of some other historically Japan-only titles like The Quest of Ki and Star Luster.
Namco saved me the trouble, though — at least in terms of urgency, I’ll be grabbing the digital release eventually since, problematic as those are, they still beat relying on the whims of subscription services — by releasing Tower of Babel on the NES portion of Nintendo Switch Online in 2023. While renamed as Mystery Tower, it became clear in a hurry just what this surprise drop was: an unearthed gem that Namco had never before bothered to share with the world outside of Japan.
Despite being named Tower of Babel and being developed by Namco, this game is unrelated to the Babylonian Castle Saga that began with The Tower of Druaga. Unless you want to imagine that it takes place millenia later way after Gil and Ki are out of the picture, and now instead of being full of monsters the tower is just full of lots of blocks you have to move both to progress and to occasionally squash a priest underneath, but that’s your thing, not Namco’s. In Mystery Tower, you play as Indy Borgnine, which is just phenomenal, really, as it allows me to consider a scenario in which Ernest Borgnine played Indiana Jones. They might have overdone it with the triangular nose just a little, but still.
Mystery Tower is a simple game, in terms of understanding the gameplay premise and what’s expected of you. Each stage has a door, which is the exit. It also has movable blocks. Most have enemies to contend with. You have to make it to the door by utilizing movable blocks to build a stairway or bridge to said door, while avoiding or trapping or dispensing with those enemies in your way. Complicating matters is that the blocks have very specific ways they can be placed that still let you traverse them, you only have a limited number of block lifts you can do in a given level, and enemies respawn when they’ve been defeated, meaning that, unless trapped inside a makeshift block prison you’ve made for them, they’ll be back to haunt you in short order, your reprieve merely a temporary one.
Some doors are right there on a floor, so you can fall right to where the door is and exit the stage. Others have vines leading up to them, so the goal there is to reach the vines and then climb to the door. Other doors are just kind of suspended in the air, and you yourself have to build the floor that you will stand on to be able to then walk through that door. All of these little changes influence how you go about exiting a level: ones where there is already a structure in place tend to require a more specific series of moves in order to reach the exit, since it wants you to reach the platform or vine in question, while ones where the door is free floating can be a little more open in terms of how you get the stairs or bridge over there. Not always, but they lean this way.
As said, you’re limited by how many moves you can make in a given stage. Early ones give you just a dozen or so, with each lift of a block consuming one power (dropping that same block does not use a second unit of power), while later stages really start you off with what seems like a huge pool of power: this first really hits you by stage 36, when you start in this large space with 50 power. There might be multiple solutions to test out, or multiple exits to attempt to reach — there’s room to experiment when you’ve got 50 power or whatever to work with. But you also don’t want to play unfocused, even with that large starting pool of power: killing enemies requires blocks, the act of which uses up power, and the item that restores power to you only does so one unit at a time. Even a large starting power total can vanish in a hurry if you end up fending off tons of enemies with blocks instead of avoiding them with some smart timing of your own movements, or you just keep throw blocks at the proverbial wall to see what sticks instead of thinking things through with a little more restraint and rationing in mind.
As the above video shows, you make stairs with the L-shaped blocks: you can’t climb up from the tall side, and if you drop a block too far into another block instead of on top of or attached alongside it, you won’t be able to pick that same block up. If you try to pry a block loose from somewhere that it’s going to be hitting another block or obstruction, you’ll waste power and have no block, so even knowing where to grab and when you can grab from is necessary. You can grab an elevated block and walk forward with it, which drops it back into place where it was but with you falling below. However, if you try to fall off a ledge while holding a block, and the block doesn’t have anywhere to latch onto on the way down, it will crush you, and you will die. You don’t have health in Mystery Tower: if an enemy touches you, you die, if you touch spikes, you die, if you are crushed under a block, you guessed it. You die.
You have a limited number of lives, but you also gain a life for completing a level, so as long as you can keep something of a balance there in terms of how many lives you use up to beat a stage and how many you gain for completing it, you can persist. And the game is password-based, with a password shown at the start of every level you get to once you reach the ones where passwords are even required, so you have infinite continues in that sense. Still, if you were looking to achieve a huge score, you’ll want to be careful and purposeful in order to avoid a bunch of restarts.
The levels get more complicated as you go, taking longer to not only beat, but to even figure out just what is required of you before you can start on that. Luckily, you can pause and then pan around the entire level, so you can get a sense of where you want to start aiming for, whether to build or to dismantle or which enemy is going to be a problem for you first, all before you actually do anything that starts consuming power. You can press the select button to kill Indy Borgnine, as well, if you happen to have accidentally put yourself in a situation where you can’t complete the stage or can’t get out of a hole you dug for yourself. On Nintendo Switch Online and the Namcot Collection versions of the game, there’s also a rewind feature that lets you avoid having to go that far, but no such luck back on the Famicom original.
There are 64 stages in Mystery Tower, unless you manage to collect the various pieces of the password that you can enter after completing those, which unlock 64 more. Getting these passwords is going to take a whole lot of experimenting, or, more honestly, a guide — they are very much designed for the kind of schoolyard rumor mongering of old, as getting one of the levels with a password component hidden within it to reveal its secret involves things like “hold right on the D-pad for 10 seconds” and then boom, an image appears on the background. You aren’t getting the whole secret password revealed by accident.
The first password stage is the eighth one, and they arrive on that schedule from there on out. They’re always very easy to complete, with only minor work needed to reach the exit, like the above video shows, but if you want to get the hidden password segment, that’s where the work is.
As the video also shows, after completing a level, your score is tallied, and it includes all kinds of possible bonuses. You receive extra points for having more leftover power. You receive 100 points for each pot you collect, which, in-level, also restores one point of power to your total. Crowns are worth 200 points post-level, and make you move a little faster in-level. Jewels appear after you’ve defeated enough enemies in a single stage, and make you briefly invincible: any enemy you touch while the jewel’s effect is active is defeated and gives you 1,000 points, and you get another 400 after the level for each jewel you collected in the stage. Last, there are the magic lamps, which are worth 1,000 bonus points post-level, and in-level, allow you to press B to move through exactly one block one time without moving it. Very useful if you’re stuck, and also a rarity.
There are two other items, though, they don’t grant post-level bonuses. Crystal balls sometimes appear, and keep doors locked until you’ve touched them all, which means you need to figure out how to reach them whether by building a path or by destroying an existing one so you fall right into the ball. There are also shooting stars, which will appear if you’ve juggled an enemy on top of a block for a bit: these jump your movement speed up substantially, but whether their path will actually intersect with yours is pretty much always up for debate.
What Mystery Tower has to offer becomes pretty clear early in your playthrough. The nature of what needs to be done, at its most basic, persists from early on in the game throughout the rest of the title. There are just three enemy types in the entire game — bats that fly/bounce around a bit to be less predictable, priests that will actively chase you, and “Babelz,” which are rock monsters that spawn blocks if there’s room to do so. The first two are a nuisance to be dealt with in one of a few ways, while Babelz can be killed or the blocks they spawn utilized in your quest to solve the puzzle of the rooms they’re in. It’s up to you to decide, in a given stage, which is the more appropriate response to their presence.
And that’s how the whole game works. There are some basic rules — build steps by placing blocks here, but if you put it here instead you’re going to be off the mark with this staircase, if you want it to fall then you need to drop it here, if you want existing structures to fall then you need to pull this block but not that one in order to have them land where they can then be utilized in a new place, etc. — but what changes is the overall complexity. There is only a video of an early, simple stage in this feature on Mystery Tower because it’s a stage that can be captured in the 30 seconds of video the Switch allows you to take. Later levels require much more thinking, much more pausing, and far more movement to sort out, beyond what can be captured in a single 30-second clip. If you enjoy what you see in the early going of Mystery Tower, though, you’ll likely continue to appreciate what it’s doing later on: it’s more of the same, but more difficult, and it doesn’t take a very long time before it shifts from “we are in a quiet pond, here’s how to swim” to yeeting you into a raging river without so much as politely advising you to try to avoid drowning.
I can’t quite understand why Namco didn’t release this game in North America back in the 80s, but it stayed in Japan for 37 years before finally releasing overseas in an official capacity. It’s worth playing now, if you have a Nintendo Switch Online subscription and access to the NES portion of it, but if you want to go a little more sicko mode with things, might I suggest going the Namcot Collection route so you can pick this up along with a few other games that didn’t make it to Namco Museum Archives? It doesn’t have the kind of influential legacy of Namco’s titans of the 80s, no, but it’s just a damn good game with plenty of challenge, and now that the technology for rewinding is there, some of the issues related to extra lives and having to input passwords have been alleviated, too. Give it a shot, rather than just dismissing it as yet another Nintendo Switch Online release that you haven’t heard of, like some people are much too fond of doing whenever a random gem like this hits.
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Another good old game to give a try, probably scrolled past it on NSO without realizing it was another long overdue U.S debut. Will have to correct that. Also did not expect to run into Digital Devil Story in this post (side note you typoed it as Digital Devil Saga in a later mention, easy one to make), which makes me wonder if you know of a youtuber called Marsh. He does extensive videos about a lot of the early Megami Tensei games.