Five Years, 125,000 Wishlists and a Nightmare Theme Park: Twisted Tower Is Finally Here

After more than five years of development, Thomas Brush’s nightmare theme park Twisted Tower launched today. It might be one of 2026’s strangest indie FPS games.

Imagine BioShock, except somebody replaced Rapture with an abandoned Disneyland, filled it with homicidal fairy-tale mascots, handed you a bubblegum machine gun and apparently decided one of your weapons also needed to be a farting shotgun.

That is Twisted Tower, and after more than five years of development, it finally launched on Steam today, August 18. It comes from Thomas Brush and Atmos Games, the indie developer behind Pinstripe and Neversong, with 3D Realms publishing. Steam currently has the game at €13.49 in France, 10% off its normal €14.99 price until September 1.

The basic setup sounds like the kind of thing someone invents at 2 a.m. and then realizes they now have to spend five years actually making. You enter a decaying 1950s amusement resort and climb through increasingly deranged areas including a hotel, waterpark, clown casino, carnival forest and space station. Somewhere at the top is the woman you are trying to save. Between you and her are mascots, traps, puzzles and some deeply questionable carnival engineering.

Watch the release trailer

Official Twisted Tower release-date trailer.

The game almost feels designed to make screenshots look insane

Normal FPS weapons were apparently not enough. Twisted Tower gives you a whack-a-mole hammer, rubber-band pistol, dart-firing Tommy Gun, bubblegum-spitting chaingun, slingshot-style sniper weapon, ray gun and, yes, the aforementioned farting shotgun. You also collect toys that let you jump, dash and grapple through the resort.

The Clown Casino is one of five major areas inside Twisted Tower. Image: Atmos Games / 3D Realms.

The BioShock comparison is completely intentional. Even 3D Realms describes the setting as an abandoned 1950s resort reminiscent of BioShock and Disney World. But the more footage I watched, the less it looked like someone simply trying to make “indie BioShock.” There is a lot of mascot horror here, but also platforming, alternate routes, weird toys and a much brighter, almost storybook visual style hiding underneath all the blood.

That combination is probably why it caught so much attention before release.

Then the wishlists went crazy

Eight days before launch, Brush posted an update saying Twisted Tower had reached 125,400 Steam wishlists. More surprisingly, he said he had watched that number climb from around 1,700 to 125,400 over the course of a single week. That is the developer's own figure, rather than independent Steam data, but even he described the jump as something he could barely believe.

For an indie developer, wishlists matter enormously. They tell Valve there is interest around a game, notify potential buyers when it releases and can help determine whether a launch gets enough momentum to escape the endless pile of new Steam releases.

And Twisted Tower needed that momentum. Brush has been working on this project for more than five years. In December 2024, he publicly said that the team members who had worked with him during that year had wrapped up and moved on, leaving him working solo again for a period. Other developers and artists have contributed during the wider production, particularly during its later stages, so calling the entire five-year project a one-man game would be misleading. But it has clearly remained a very small indie production centered heavily around Brush himself.

In his final pre-launch update, Brush wrote about the bugs, pressure and “shoulda coulda wouldas” piling up as release approached. He also said that after five-plus years, simply seeing the game reach its final form felt surreal.

That is the side of indie development we usually do not see in the trailer.

He even added an entire Noir Mode right before launch

One of the stranger late additions is a full black-and-white Noir Mode.

Twisted Tower’s black-and-white Noir Mode was revealed shortly before release. Image: Atmos Games.

There is also an animated comparison from the developer:

Brush revealed the mode only eight days before release while explaining that he had also reworked the score and made countless changes since the public demo.

Personally, I love additions like this. Nobody needed a black-and-white mode in a game about murdering nightmare mascots with toy weapons, but someone looked at the game and thought, “You know what this needs? 1940s horror-movie energy.” That is exactly the kind of unnecessary idea that gives an indie game personality.

The first players are arriving, but do not trust a “review score” yet

This is launch day, so there simply are not enough Steam reviews to tell you that players universally love or hate it.

At the time I checked, Steam displayed 16 total submitted reviews, with 15 positive and one negative, while only two were counted as direct Steam-purchaser reviews in the main store summary. That is far too small a sample to declare the game a hit based on user reviews.

The early comments are encouraging, though. Players have praised the atmosphere, weapon variety, mascot-horror setting and voice acting. One early player with more than six hours recorded said the setting originally pulled them in but they were surprised by how much they enjoyed the story and voice acting. Another praised the game as a fun atmospheric FPS for the price.

There are already technical complaints too. One player with an RTX 5080 and Ryzen 7 9800X3D reported noticeable hitching and stuttering despite extremely high frame rates, so performance is something worth watching as more people play.

That is why I would not give Twisted Tower the usual launch-day “players are loving it!” headline yet.

Give people a few days.

Let them actually finish the thing.

The jump from Pinstripe to this is kind of ridiculous

One reason the development story interests me is how far this is from Brush's earlier work.

Pinstripe and Neversong were atmospheric 2D games. Twisted Tower is his first big jump into a fully 3D first-person game, meaning the project required entirely different approaches to characters, animation, environments, combat and level design. Brush has described atmosphere, storytelling and world-building as his strongest areas, while working with specialized tools and collaborators for parts of the 3D pipeline.

Probably not the amusement park entrance you want to see at night. Image: Atmos Games / 3D Realms.

And somewhere along that transition, the simple idea became this enormous nightmare resort with alternate paths, five themed areas, fully voiced characters, platforming systems and guns that fire candy.

That is very indie development.

Start with a reasonable project.

Have an idea.

Add another idea.

Five years later you are debugging a farting shotgun at 3 a.m.

Twisted Tower is officially open

The game launched today on PC through Steam. The official Steam page currently lists 18 achievements, controller support, Steam Cloud and Family Sharing, and the install itself requires only around 8GB of storage.

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1575990/Twisted_Tower/

What happens next is the interesting part. More than 125,000 people reportedly put this thing on their wishlist before release. Now Brush and 3D Realms get to find out how many of those people actually buy it.

I have not played enough of it to tell anyone this is secretly the next BioShock, and with so few launch-day user reviews, anyone already declaring it an indie masterpiece is getting ahead of themselves.

But as an indie story, I already love it.

Five years of development. A tiny team. More than 125,000 wishlists. A nightmare Disneyland. A clown casino. Noir Mode. Evil mascots.

And somehow the farting shotgun might still be the least strange part.

If Twisted Tower holds up once more players reach the top, this could be one of those weird indie games people spend the next few weeks telling their friends, “Just trust me, you need to see this.”