Magic Mansion, a retro-styled arcade platformer, sees you trying to scale a never-ending tower, with traps on every floor.
This adorable mobile game challenges you to climb up the tower, taking on each floor with its traps and monsters. Magic Mansion is the name of both the game and the tower you are climbing.
Starting, fittingly, as a witch character you are to take on the tower and get to the highest level you can. You’re constantly walking forward, with no way to slow down or stop yourself. Instead you can tap to jump and avoid traps. This is the only control you have within the game — a single-button action of just jumping at exactly the right time. The traps are tricky, and it will take a few goes at the tower before you are able to understand the timing of them all.
Spikes are a simple trap and appear on the floor as a single spike, surrounded by coins, or as a group of three spikes, forcing you to quickly jump over them. Sometimes, there are boxes that you need to run into, which can reveal nothing or spikes. Hitting these boxes will turn you around, meaning you’ll need to hit the wall before continuing on the right way.
Monsters come in a few different shapes; there are slimes that move quickly toward you, ghosts that run away from you, hit the wall, then come back, and fires that light the floor then disappear leaving darkness, forcing you to guess at the right moment to jump.
Cannons also appear from time to time, shooting at you. You’ll need to time your jumps accordingly. Some of the cannon floors also have a box on them at head height, forcing you to hit it, travel to the wall and then turn around to make it back to the latter. As you make it up further and further, you’ll find more of these different traps and enemies. Each time you play, the floors are freshly generated, meaning you won’t be playing the same portion of the tower over and over until you have mastered it.
At the bottom of the screen you can see your death counter — which if you’re like me is very high. You can also see the best score you’ve gotten within the game. Some levels of the tower do have coins, which you can collect to purchase new characters or continue the run when you die. New characters don’t contain any abilities, but just give you a cute creature to have climb the tower.
Magic Mansion is a fun and challenging little mobile platformer. There aren’t many ads within the game — even if you find yourself just dying a lot. For a free game, there’s not much more to ask for. Cute graphics, challenging traps and the feeling nagging at you to play just one more time.
