The Tower is brilliant - and a bit about AI chatbots

The Tower is exactly my kind of thing. It's a Pico-8 game created by the luminously talented designer Tallywinkle, and I've been playing it on-and-off since last week. I think on-and-off is actually the best, and perhaps the only true, way to enjoy this.

And the idea is simple. You're climbing a tower one floor at a time. Each floor has a staircase that's generally blocked off by a random-number-generator dice roll of one to 100. If I roll the dice and the number is equal to or higher than the number of the floor I'm on, I can go up the stairs to the next floor. If the number is lower, then the stairs take me down to the floor below and I have to try to go up again.

A few things here. The Tower won me over from the moment that it announced itself via a friend, the dep-ed of Edge, as a game about climbing a tower. This is something I never tire of in games. Crackdown, Arkham, I just love a good tower. But I love this tower all the more because of its chunky pixels and rich, Pico-8 colours - those lurid magentas and neon greens - and the glitchy presentation which sees the colours themselves pied and strobing as ghostly scan lines move up and down, which sees characters and items suddenly pop into existence and then disappear again.

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