About Troll's Tower
The barrel-rolling climb in the Donkey Kong tradition, in the beacon towers of the Westmarches. A swamp troll has come up out of the marsh and taken the watchtowers; it sits at the top of each by its stolen ale and rolls the kegs down the sloping ramparts at anyone who climbs. You are a man-at-arms of the watch: walk the ramparts, take the ladders up, jump the kegs as they come or take up the mallet and smash them, and light the beacon at the top.
The kegs follow the arcade's own rule for taking a ladder down, seeded so a tower plays the same way every time: never when they are level with you or below, more often when you are under the ladder, and never onto you when you are just below its top. A keg that is about to go down rocks at the ladder's top first, a warning the arcade never gave. The jump is the genre's committed jump, but a press is remembered for a moment and still taken just after you step off an edge, and no rampart end can be walked off.
There are 120 towers in eight chapters, each with its own painted place: broken ladders, a brazier that turns blue kegs into fire-imps, wild kegs that bounce straight down, a lift shaft with springing kegs, a mill of moving belts, and a Pin Tower where you pull every iron pin to bring the troll's roost down. Every tower was climbed by a planning bot without losing a life before it shipped, and none can be climbed without losing a life by running blindly for the ladders, jumping or not. Each keeps two Top 10s, best score and fastest climb; every run on them is re-played by the site before it is ranked.
How to play
- Goal
- Climb past the troll's rolling kegs to the beacon at the top of the tower and light it (in the Pin Tower, pull out every iron pin instead).
- How it ends
- The tower is won when the beacon is lit or the last pin comes out; it is lost when the last of three lives goes to a keg, a fire-imp, the troll or a fall, or when the bonus runs down to nothing.
- Record
- For every tower, the ten best scores and the ten fastest climbs, each proved by replaying the run.
- Walk with ← → or A D, climb a ladder with ↑ ↓ or W S, jump with Space; on a touch screen, hold and slide the stick and press Jump.
- Jump the kegs as they roll at you (100 each, 300 for two in one jump), or jump into the mallet and smash them for ten seconds. Watch for a keg rocking at a ladder's top: it is coming down.
- Three lives. Reach the beacon (or pull every pin in the Pin Tower) to win; what is left of the bonus is scored.
Controls
| ← → · A D | Walk (hold) |
|---|---|
| ↑ ↓ · W S | Climb a ladder (hold; you are drawn onto it) |
| Space · J | Jump, the way you are walking |
| Stick, Jump button | The same on a touch screen: hold the stick and slide it; a slant walks and takes the ladder when it comes |
| P · Escape | Pause (the run then counts as practice) |
The man-at-arms and the swamp troll are Blender renders of the Morass warehouse's rigged figures (his ladder climb borrowed from a Mixamo traversal pack); the kegs, ladder, mallet, braziers and keepsakes are renders of warehouse models, the ramparts are carved from warehouse stone textures, and each chapter's backdrop is a warehouse painting. The simulation uses whole numbers only and a run is just the inputs you used, so every browser plays it back identically and the records worker re-plays each one before it enters a Top 10. Your bests stay in this browser under morass.trolls-tower.v1. No ads or analytics run inside the game.
