Twisted Tower thomas brush: Developer Update & Tips

Twisted Tower is an atmospheric first-person horror adventure created by Thomas Brush and developed by Atmos Games. Its central setting is an abandoned 1950s resort filled with fairy-tale mascots, dangerous traps, strange puzzles, and multiple themed areas. The game combines colorful fantasy imagery with darker horror, creating a tone that sits between a haunted theme park, a story-driven immersive sim, and a stylized action adventure.

The project began with a simpler, pixelated visual direction and a gloomy retro-horror mood. Over time, its presentation evolved toward a more polished blend of BioShock-inspired environments, amusement-park fantasy, mascot horror, and cinematic storytelling. That evolution is important because Twisted Tower is not built around a single genre reference. Its identity comes from the contrast between playful attractions and threatening spaces.

Video Highlights:

• Thomas Brush explains how Twisted Tower changed during four years of development.
• The update covers optimization, lighting, cutscenes, music, level scale, and story revisions.
• Beta testing provides practical lessons about player behavior and game readability.
• The development process emphasizes iteration rather than preserving every early idea.

The official Twisted Tower Steam page lists five major areas: the hotel, waterpark, clown casino, carnival forest, and space station. Each location gives the tower a different visual and thematic identity while supporting the larger journey toward the top.

A major part of the project’s development involved moving from a broadly lit, highly detailed environment toward more controlled cinematic presentation. Thomas Brush described using fewer lights and selectively enabling shadows instead of treating every object as equally important. This approach supports two goals at once: improving performance and directing the player’s attention.

Practical lighting attempts to make every lamp, sign, and fixture behave like a realistic light source. Cinematic lighting is more deliberate. It uses a smaller number of carefully placed lights to shape a scene, establish depth, and emphasize specific objects. In a horror game, that control can be more valuable than strict realism.

The same principle applies to shadows. Rather than allowing every mesh and light to cast shadows by default, the development process focused on activating shadows where they added mood or depth. A baby carriage, doorway, mascot, or environmental prop can create a stronger image than dozens of competing shadows.

The official game description presents Twisted Tower as a “hauntingly beautiful” resort. That phrase fits the visual strategy: beauty and discomfort are meant to exist together. A clean composition can make an environment more disturbing because the player has fewer distractions from the details that matter.

Twisted Tower combines exploration with first-person combat and movement-focused progression. The Steam listing describes a toy-like arsenal that includes a whack-a-mole mallet, rubber-band pistol, dart-firing Tommy Gun, farting shotgun, bubblegum chain-gun, sniper slingshot, and ray gun. These weapons reinforce the game’s unusual tone: combat can be violent while still looking like it belongs in a bizarre amusement resort.

The game also includes toys and tools that assist with jumping, dashing, and grappling. This creates a more active exploration loop than simply walking from room to room. Players are encouraged to examine the environment, find routes through the tower, and use movement abilities to access or escape areas.

A useful design lesson from the development update is the value of interrupting the main gameplay loop. A basic loop might involve finding a key, opening a door, gaining an ability, and repeating the sequence. Twisted Tower adds variety by changing the player’s expectations. Weapons may become unavailable, elevators may stop working, lights may fail, or a level may replace regular enemy encounters with a focused hunt.

Story development was another major focus during the project’s later stages. New and revised cutscenes helped connect the protagonist’s journey to the goal of reaching the top of the tower and winning back the love of his life. Voice lines were also re-recorded for both cinematic scenes and in-game characters, allowing the narrative presentation to better match the revised direction.

Cutscenes can be especially useful in an indie production because they give the developer strong control over timing, dialogue, camera movement, and emotional emphasis. They provide a structured way to introduce characters and reveal information without requiring every player to discover the same narrative beat through free exploration.

Music serves a different but equally important function. Melodic tracks can establish character, romance, or a chapter’s identity, while atmospheric and atonal layers can build pressure during exploration and combat. The development update describes layered horror music that increases in intensity as enemies become more involved.

The result is a division between what the player sees and what the player feels. Lighting can hide information, while music suggests that something is changing nearby. Dialogue can create sympathy for a character, while the environment undermines that comfort with unsettling details.

Beta testing helped evaluate whether the project’s long development time was producing a stronger game. The most useful approach was observing people play in person rather than relying only on written feedback. Players may overlook a key, miss a jump scare, walk past a story clue, or fail to understand an objective without explaining the problem aloud.

For a developer, direct observation exposes issues that questionnaires often miss. A tester’s hesitation, repeated movement, incorrect assumption, or failure to react can reveal problems with level design, communication, pacing, or audio. These observations are especially important in horror games, where the intended emotional response may not occur if the player misses the setup.

The project’s later optimization work targeted mid-range computers and Steam Deck performance. The development update specifically discusses disabling unnecessary shadows, reducing light usage, and adding graphics options. The Steam listing identifies Steam Deck compatibility as Verified and includes adjustable difficulty, subtitle options, camera comfort, custom volume controls, rebindable input support, and play-at-your-own-pace features.

The Steam page lists a release date of August 18, 2026, 18 achievements, single-player support, and a Very Positive review rating based on the displayed review data. These details may change as the store page updates, so use the official listing for the latest release and platform information.