Oaken Tower is too good not to play

Right now, the only thing you can play from Oaken Tower is a demo – a very generous demo – but a demo nonetheless. Containing a single mode, a few different categories of items and a very basic visual style that makes it easy to pass by.

And yet I’ve spent over 75 hours in that demo. I’m begging you not to do the same, although I could hardly blame you if you did. That’s more time than I’ve spent playing Skyrim, Kerbal Space Program, and even more than Vampire Survivors. The game – even in this basic demo form – is just too good not to play.

At its heart, Oaken Tower is a roguelike autobattler. Each turn you get presented with a shop, you buy weapons to add to your arsenal, then you go into the next match and see how you get on against a set-up designed by another real player. You don’t have any control over how to use your weapons, they all fire automatically – that’s the core of what an autobattler is after all. While you are technically against a real person, it’s completely asynchronous. So the game simply records your set up for each day of a run and then puts you up against the setups created by other players at the same point in their runs. There’s no matchmaking times or lag, and, most importantly, you can stand up to grab a drink or make a sandwich in the middle of your game.

If your set of weapons gets rid of your enemy’s hitpoints before they can do the same to you, you get a win. If you die first, you lose some hearts. Get ten wins before you lose all of your hearts and you win the run, lose your hearts early and it’s game over. It’s all so simple.

Of course you quickly start noticing layers of complexity just under the surface that start to get their grubby little claws into you right away. Some weapons, like a curved dagger, will get you gold as well as doing damage, so you might want to make use of those in your early matches – maybe even throwing the rounds – just so you can earn more cash to get better upgrades later. Some weapons are much stronger than others, but also rarer, so investing in them might mean that you can never upgrade them because you don’t find the copies you need, while a weaker weapon is plentiful and easy to get to the highest upgrade level.