Tall Unlimited
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| Tall Unlimited

Monkey Paw Games has been doing a great job bringing various old skool PSX games to the PlayStation Store, including a number of Japanese titles that never saw the light of day in the West.

One such title is Tall Unlimited, a tower-building puzzler that's quite unlike anything else you can find in the puzzle gaming genre, as you race to raise a tower against the clock.

While it's a novel idea, there really isn't much to it. Not only is it a one-trick pony, but it's the kind of pony that, having performed a trick, promptly lies on a pile of hay and falls asleep.

Tall order

You play as a stickman in a top hat, standing on a tower that's slowly crumbling beneath you. The tower is made up of cubes, each of which is split diagonally into four different-coloured sections.

By standing on stone cubes and rolling them left and right you need to match the colours on the sides with corresponding sides of adjacent cubes. Doing so makes those cubes sprout more cubes and extend upwards.

Using this basic idea, the goal is to keep the tower tall enough that the destruction below doesn't catch up with you. There's also a neat Puzzle mode that doesn't have a time limit, but rather asks you to beat the level in a set number of moves.

There's a trick to helping our blue Jiminy Cricket out. When you roll the cubes, you may find yourself overshooting and not being able to make a match. However, if you roll a cube up on top of another one it will rotate 180 degrees. Roll it back down and it only moves by 90 degrees. Using this method, you can continue to spin the cube until it's in the position you require.

Tall Unlimited is hard. Really hard. It took us several goes to even understand the concept (as basic and it sounds) and even then we had a hard time surviving for more than three minutes. This is a game that you need to put a huge amount of work into if you want to get anything back.

Not so unlimited

If Tall Unlimited sounds a little lacking in content, that's because it is. Once you've grown bored of the main mode (which won't take long) and tackled the Puzzle mode for an hour, you're pretty much done.

On top of this, the controls can be finicky at times - in particular, we found ourselves overshooting with our cubes several times each game.

It's also worth noting that the majority of the game's menus are in Japanese. You can still easily play the game, as the main menu and the action itself are in English, but don't expect to go trawling through the options to adjust bits and bobs.

This also means that there's no tutorial, so you'll need to resort to Google to find out how it actually works and what the controls are.

Tall Unlimited is a novel game, but it's not an entirely successful one. If you're a hardcore puzzle gamer then you might enjoy it - just watch a trailer or two before parting with your cash. If you're anything less than hardcore, you needn't even bother watching a trailer - this isn't for you.

Tall Unlimited

Only pick up Tall Unlimited if you're willing to put serious time into mastering the craft - and even then it's all very irksome
Score
Mike Rose
Mike Rose
An expert in the indie games scene, Mike comes to Pocket Gamer as our handheld gaming correspondent. He is the author of 250 Indie Games You Must Play.