Tower Climber, a Fun Little Browser Game to Waste Away Your Existence With

As you trawl around the internet looking for something to do while Reddit is down, it’s interesting where your browsing can take you. Sometimes it’s Wikipedia articles about George Lucas’ plans for a 3D re-release of the Star Wars films in 2012 (ugh) and sometimes it’s random Japanese browser games. This time it’s the latter.

Tower Climber is pretty much what it says in the title; you’re a prince whose darling princess is stuck at the top of a rather tall tower. Your mission, naturally, is to climb your way up and rescue her. Instead of the usual A-S-D-W or arrow control scheme, you jump by simply clicking the mouse anywhere on the screen. That’s the only control on the game and makes it nice and simple. (But not easy!)

Each platform is in a slightly different position so to jump to each one you have to time your clicks, collecting little crystals as you go. You don’t have to worry about falling off the sides, however; once you hit the edge he simply turns around and goes the other way. The threat is falling while you’re jumping. It takes timing to jump from one platform, especially because you have no control over the prince’s direction.

To make matters slightly more difficult you’ve got some falling baddies to contend with. These critters won’t kill you, but they will freeze you for a time. This isn’t an issue until you collect 30 crystals where a spiky platform starts to hurry you up the tower, adding some pressure and pace to the game. I’ve not reached it yet, but it says (in Google’s mangled translation) that some sort of clouds emerge at 60 crystals and spikes at 90.

Like all little browser games, there’s nothing here that will keep you playing for ages, but it’s a rather fun little time-waster. I’ve sat and played for half an hour or so as I’ve written this post and it hasn’t really gotten that irritating. I’ve not yet reached the top (53 crystals is my score so far!) but I’ll probably keep playing for a little bit more.

So there you go, instead of reading about the reanimation of the corpse of your favourite sci-fi space epic, check out Tower Climber. It’ll be better for your health.