The Deadly Tower of Monsters

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

The Deadly Tower of Monsters is a top-down indie shooter for the PlayStation 4 and PC via Steam. Released in January 2016, it's developed by ACE Team, the same people who made Zeno Clash and published by Atlus.

Ostensibly, you play the role of the titular movie's main protagonists - Dick Starspeed, Scarlet Nova, and Robot - in their sci-fi adventures. The added twist though is that the game is actually the DVD copy of an old, schlocky B-movie, complete with running commentary from the fictional film's director, Dan Smith. It's Better Than It Sounds, as there's as much solid gameplay and vertical action to be found here as there are many, many shout-outs to the So Bad It's Good classics of yesteryear.

A trailer for the game can be found here.

Tropes used in The Deadly Tower of Monsters include:

Robot: "Dick, malfunction...Dick, malfunction..."

  • Action Girl: Scarlet Nova.
  • Affectionate Parody: Of B-movies, bad sci-fi space operas and everything in between.
  • Bad Bad Acting: Neither one of the actors playing Dick and Scarlet can act to save their lives, which just adds to the campy atmosphere.
  • Cliche Storm: Just about every conceivable trope associated with So Bad It's Good schlock is deliberately invoked.
  • Deliberate Values Dissonance: Lampooned. Dan Smith brings up out how he thought the movie-going public in the 1970s weren't quite ready for his ideas on no-nonsense Action Girls and how he was ahead of his time. On other hand, said 1970s moving-going public were actually just fine with Action Girls as they saw nothing special about the director's "progressive" vision.
  • Department of Redundancy Department: Early on, the Big Bad Emperor tries to imprison Scarlet Nova on top of the Tower of Eternal Solitude for all eternity.
  • The Dev Team Thinks of Everything: The commentary track will put into account quite a few small details if you do something seemingly unexpected. One example is twirling Scarlet around in a circle early on. Not only will Dan Smith comment on this and how she doesn't quite does it as well as Dick, but if you do the same thing to Dick later on, he'll acknowledge that too and follow up on the comparison made previously.
  • Executive Meddling: Apparently, the squid enemies found in the game were the result of the producers' nephews coming to the set and wanted to be part of the movie. Which over the course of the game, turns out to be one out of several "compromises."
  • Framing Device: The entire game is this, framed as an in-verse DVD of the titular movie. And with the commentary track switched on.
  • Jerkass: The director is such an bumbling sleaze that despite acknowledging how much of a "trooper" the actor playing Robot was, he wasn't put on the payroll and thus was never included in the credits.
  • Hypocritical Humor: For all of Dan Smith's pretensions of being a visionary director who's in it for the art, he sure likes undermining his own arguments.
  • Lantern Jaw of Justice: Dick Starspeed. Lampshaded in the commentary, which brings up how the actor playing Dick was chosen because Dan Smith thought he had movie star material.
  • MST3K Mantra: Dan Smith seems to fully embrace this trope.
  • Pet The Dog: For all of Dan Smith's antics, he still appreciates talent when he sees it (usually) and makes a point to provide food to his film crew.
  • Prima Donna Director: The running commentary shows Dan Smith to be this, in addition to being a very sleazy director.
  • Prop Recycling: In-verse, some of the monsters and backdrops were taken from another movie Dan Smith made previously.
  • Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: The actor playing Dick Starspeed talks like a second-rate Captain Kirk.
  • Raygun Gothic: The "high-tech" gadgets and weapons on display are as cheesy as they go.
  • Retraux: The titular movie itself looks and acts like it comes straight out of the era it was purportedly made. With the director being a melange of every mid-20th Century schlockmeister, with a dash of Ed Wood in for good measure.
  • The Seventies: The film comes from this decade (and looks the part). Though the style also evokes the sort of sci-fi B-movies that were popular in The Fifties.
  • Somewhere a Palaeontologist Is Crying: The Stop Motion dinosaurs Dick, Scarlet and Robot fight do not sound, let alone behave at all like any real prehistoric creature.
  • Special Effect Failure: All over the place, and it's deliberate. The cheap dolls, plastic trees and obviously fake spaceship are just the tip of the iceberg.
  • Stylistic Suck: The game actually does a very good job simulating all the trappings of a bad, low-budget B-movie, right down to the boom mics and visible strings. The developers even manage to replicate the cheap Stop Motion effects on various creatures by intentionally slowing down their models' framerate.
  • Viewers are Morons: How the commentary tries to justify some of the more ludicrous stuff on-screen, as even he didn't really give a damn about plot or being accurate.
  • Vindicated by History: Dan Smith, the director commentating over the in-verse film, likes to think his work's been vindicated. Though it's not necessarily for the reasons he claim.
  • X Meets Y: Flash Gordon meets Plan 9 from Outer Space and a lot of other B-movies.
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