I love it when developers just cut to the chase. Don’t get me wrong, incredibly roundabout storytelling and nonsense justification is my bread and butter. If it wasn’t, why the hell would I ever play a Final Fantasy game? But sometimes it’s really nice just to say, “You’re going here because there’s treasure and you want treasure. The end.” How refreshing! Do you know how much time we could save, as an invasive species, if we just put the main point front and center? I told my last job interviewer, “I’m applying because it pays better than what I’m making now,” and that actually worked. So don’t be afraid to be transparent, kids! That’s all to say that Old Towers is as brazen as they come, and, as a result, I can simply enjoy the quirky gameplay and difficult exploration.

Well, I ain’t sayin’ he’s a gold digger, but he is. Like, clearly.

Chip and Chop are two dudes who happen to have antigravity boots and a thirst for collecting treasure that only appears once every hundred years. The Old Towers, named because they are, in fact, old, have appeared and are full of treasure. Why do we need to know any more than that? Chip’s educational background or Chop’s affinity for Precious Moments figurines have nothing to do with what happens next. What does happen is that the two of them need to work together in order to obtain all the loose coins in the rooms before moving on to the next area. This is a standard looting endeavor, people. Just because Chop wants to wear a mask to make it even more awesome doesn’t change the process or the goal, so stay on target and get moving!

Utilizing no buttons whatsoever, Old Towers is a unique puzzle game where Chip and Chop have to gather all the coins in any given room. Their only action is to move in the direction they decide to go, and they will move until they hit a wall. For about half the levels, only one of them (Chip, I assume) is moving about, collecting by his lonesome. You need to plan your timing right to dodge fireballs, bats, and several other obstacles that come and go as they please. Unto itself, these solo missions are good at setting up the expectations of each tower, which comes with their own unique obstacles (vanishing tiles, electric barriers) that you’ll need to figure out and overcome. If you touch anything deadly even once, it’s game over,r and you get thrown back to the start of the stage.

Back to back, the two bros consider how to evade that single bat that’s plagued them for years.

Once you’re comfortable there, the other half brings in Chop, and this is where it gets interesting. Suddenly, the A button comes into play, which you use to freeze whoever you’re currently controlling and pivot to the other dude. Now, you can’t simply freeze in midair, nor does the game allow you to create an unfair advantage through the freezes. The dude has to be touching a wall and, in the act of anchoring, not be left unmoored should the other dude take off. This leads to seeing where and when you can “lock in” to swap to the other character, with the unique advantage that a character who is frozen can’t be harmed by hazards, so you can safely move about while your gargoyled companion just absorbs hits like nobody’s business.

The devs of Old Towers have really locked in on a key concept that comes across marvelously in this NES-grade title. It’s got some challenge to it, it’s got some elements that need to be learned, and it’s got a flair for the execution of it all. Each tower stands apart in design and visual aspect, while still having some similarities. Much like NES titles of old had to use palette swaps to create new ideas while saving on space, you can appreciate the minute differences between Chip and Chop, between the walls and ceiling tiles, without becoming overwhelmed with a ton of different textures cropping up arbitrarily. It’s a contained world that has enough modern access to tools for creation without going over-the-top. That is to say, I could easily see this being at home on my family’s machine back in 1989.

In that same vein, Old Towers also doesn’t overstay its welcome. With a bit of timing and planning, you can knock out the entire game, start to finish, first time, in under two hours, probably under one if you’re on the right machine. Each tower has about ten rooms, and there are no bosses or secret levels to be discovered. Once you’ve successfully looted the final tower, that’s it: time to pack it in and go home. The biggest challenge is realizing that you don’t need to overthink things: once you understand the flow of how to get all the coins, just be patient and follow the pathway that opens up before you. There’s no high score or time attack mode, just completing and letting Chip and Chop banter as they float off into the sunset.

C’mon, guess which one the Airship Tower is. I believe in you.

This is going to be either a win or a loss for players in general, and it depends on what you’re planning to sign on for when you pick up the game. On the one hand, in a world where 40+ hour RPGs are the norm and anything that takes less than a week of your life is considered “too brief,” there might be some pushback for a game to be printed on physical media. On the other hand, it does capture some of the novelty of the old-school cartridge experience and understanding that not every title you get for your console is going to dominate your life. Personally, I’m in the latter camp, and I thought Old Towers nailed the right amount of time. Any more and it would have been too repetitive, a little less and it would have felt overly cheap.

As a result of being brief, the flaws of Old Towers are almost as prominent as the successes. Players are treated to a small array of sound effects as you dash around, dodge projectiles, and collect coins, but an actual soundtrack is brazenly absent. I don’t know if this was an artistic choice to underline that these towers are, in fact, old and mysterious, but no music in an NES game was fairly unpleasant. I tried emulating it all over the place, and I never found a core or machine that magically produced the soundtrack. Perhaps it’s present on the other versions of the game (Old Towers is on NES, Mega Drive, and SNES), but the 8-bit version is suffering from aural blue balls.

Even on the Vita, these two guys can clearly see they’re in a bad situation.

While I didn’t get a chance to play this on my OG NES, I did emulate it on several machines, and the result was satisfying each time. The scrolling from top to bottom for the towers to give you a sense of height and depth of the area is well-made, and the framerate remained consistent on an iPhone, a PS Vita, and an RG36S. It stands to reason that the experience may be even better on the console, particularly with the different iterations, but I’m purely looking at the NES version. The result? A relatively short, simple but engaging puzzle adventure that gives me a mild flashback to my Adventures of Lolo days with a far less complex objective. 

I think the retroscene should continue to support these endeavors, though Old Towers could stand a bit more polish in terms of audio and some typos that exist in the sparse textual portions. It’s clever enough, enjoyable, and actually required some level of consideration to finish it. I can gladly add it to my finished games stack for 2026, and then zoom onto new adventures. Like Chip and Chop, I’m just here for the loot: once I’m done, it’s off into the sunset, cool mask and all.

Old Towers is available now on NES, Mega Drive, and SNES (physical cartridges).

Reviewed on NEStopia Emulation Core.

A copy of Old Towers was provided by the publisher.